Blaise Pascal Quotes
-
I condemn equally those who choose to praise man, those who choose to condemn him and those who choose to divert themselves, and I can only approve of those who seek with groans.
-
En un mot, l'homme conna|"t qu'il est mise rable: il est donc mise rable, puisqu'il l'est; mais il est bien grand, puisqu'il le conna|"t. In one word, man knows that he is miserable and therefore he is miserable because he knows it; but he is also worthy, because he knows his condition.
-
E? loquence quipersuade par douceur, non par empire, en tyran, non en roi. Eloquence should persuade gently, not by force or like a tyrant or king.
-
Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.
-
Man is nothing but insincerity, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in regard to himself and in regard to others. He does not wish that he should be told the truth, he shuns saying it to others; and all these moods, so inconsistent with justice and reason, have their roots in his heart.
-
Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them.
-
Things are always at their best in their beginning.
-
Few friendships would survive if each one knew what his friend says of him behind his back.
-
If there were only one religion, God would indeed be manifest.
-
All the excesses, all the violence, and all the vanity of great men, come from the fact that they know not what they are: it being difficult for those who regard themselves at heart as equal with all men... For this it is necessary for one to forget himself, and to believe that he has some real excellence above them, in which consists this illusion that I am endeavoring to discover to you.
-
The heart has its order, the mind has its own, which uses principles and demonstrations. The heart has a different one. We do not prove that we ought to be loved by setting out in order the causes of love; that would be absurd.
-
Two things control men's nature, instinct and experience.
-
What a vast difference there is between knowing God and loving Him.
-
Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it.
-
Those who write against vanity want the glory of having written well, and their readers the glory of reading well, and I who write this have the same desire, as perhaps those who read this have also.
-
(Man,) the glory and the scandal of the universe.
-
The stream is always purer at its source. [Fr., Les choses valent toujours mieux dans leur source.]
-
That queen, of error, whom we call fancy and opinion, is the more deceitful because she does not always deceive. She would be the infallible rule of truth if she were the infallible rule of falsehood; but being only most frequently in error, she gives no evidence of her real quality, for she marks with the same character both that which is true and that which is false.
-
The knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him.
-
In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.
-
The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.
-
The parts of the universe ... all are connected with each other in such a way that I think it to be impossible to understand any one without the whole.
-
I maintain that, if everyone knew what others said about him, there would not be four friends in the world.
-
You always admire what you really don't understand.