Blaise Pascal Quotes
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Not to be mad is another form of madness.
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There is a lot of difference between tempting and leading into error. God tempts but does not lead into error. To tempt is to provide opportunities for us to do certain things if we do not love God, but putting us under no necessity to do so. To lead into error is to compel a man necessarily to conclude and follow a falsehood.
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Too much and too little wine. Give him none, he cannot find truth; give him too much, the same.
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Je ne crois que les histoires dont les te moins se feraient e gorger. I only believe in histories told by witnesses who would have had their throats slit.
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We like to be deceived.
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Eloquence; it requires the pleasant and the real; but the pleasant must itself be drawn from the true.
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The last proceeding of reason is to recognize that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it. There is nothing so conformable to reason as this disavowal of reason.
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Let no one say that I have said nothing new... the arrangement of the subject is new. When we play tennis, we both play with the same ball, but one of us places it better.
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We must know where to doubt, where to feel certain, where to submit. He who does not do so, understands not the force of reason.
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All men naturally hate one another. I hold it a fact, that if men knew exactly what one says of the other, there would not be four friends in the world.
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It is man's natural sickness to believe that he possesses the Truth.
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The world is ruled by force, not by opinion; but opinion uses force.
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Let us now speak according to natural lights. If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible. . . . We are then incapable of knowing of either what He is or if He is. . . .
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As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.
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The war existing between the senses and reason.
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Those who do not hate their own selfishness and regard themselves as more important than the rest of the world are blind because the truth lies elsewhere.
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Dans une grande a" me tout est grand. In a great soul everything isgreat.
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There is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition.
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All the maxims have been written. It only remains to put them into practice.
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We are never in search of things, but always in search of the search.
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Il y a deux sortes d'esprits, l'un ge ome trique, et l'autre que l'on peut appeler de finesse. Le premier a des vues lentes, dures et inflexibles; mais le dernier a une souplesse de pense e. There are two kinds of mind, one mathematical, the other what one might call the intuitive. The first takes a slow, firm, inflexible view, but the latter has flexibility of thought.
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Our imagination so magnifies this present existence, by the power of continual reflection on it, and so attenuates eternity, by not thinking of it at all, that we reduce an eternity to nothingness, and expand a mere nothing to an eternity; and this habit is so inveterately rooted in us that all the force of reason cannot induce us to lay it aside.
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It has pleased God that divine verities should not enter the heart through the understanding, but the understanding through the heart.
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Between us, and Hell or Heaven, there is only life between the two, which is the most fragile thing in the world. Variant: Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.