Blaise Pascal Quotes
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You are in the same manner surrounded with a small circle of persons... full of desire. They demand of you the benefits of desire... You are therefore properly the king of desire. ...equal in this to the greatest kings of the earth... It is desire that constitutes their power; that is, the possession of things that men covet.
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Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism.
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We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. When we think to attach ourselves to any pointand to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes for ever. Nothing stays for us.
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Our notion of symmetry is derived form the human face. Hence, we demand symmetry horizontally and in breadth only, not vertically nor in depth.
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Custom determines what is agreeable.
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This is what I see, and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and everywhere I see nothing but obscurity. Nature offers me nothing that is not a matter of doubt and disquiet.
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There are hardly any truths upon which we always remain agreed, and still fewer objects of pleasure which we do not change every hour, I do not know whether there is a means of giving fixed rules for adapting discourse to the inconstancy of our caprices.
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It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist.
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If they have entered into the spirit if these rules, and if the rules have made sufficient impression on them to become rooted and established in their minds, they will feel how much difference there is between what is said here and what a few logicians may perhaps have written by chance approximating to it in a few passages of their works.
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Tout notre raisonnement se re duit a' ce der au sentiment. All our reasoning comes down to surrendering to feeling.
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There are two excesses: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason. The supreme achievement of reason is to realise that there is a limit to reason. Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go as far as to realise that.
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If it had pleased them the legislators to order that this wealth, after having been possessed by fathers during their life, should return to the republic after their death, you would have no reason to complain of it.
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All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.
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There is a virtuous fear, which is the effect of faith; and there is a vicious fear, which is the product of doubt. The former leads to hope, as relying on God, in whom we believe; the latter inclines to despair, as not relying on God, in whom we do not believe. Persons of the one character fear to lose God; persons of the other character fear to find Him.
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Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves.
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Christian piety annihilates the egoism of the heart; worldly politeness veils and represses it.
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Let man then contemplate nature in full and lofty majesty, and turn his eyes away from the mean objects which surround him. Let him look at the dazzling light hung aloft as an eternal lamp to lighten the universe; let him behold the earth, a mere dot compared with the vast circuit which that orb describes, and stand amazed to find that the vast circuit itself is but a very fine point compared with the orbit traced by the starts as they roll their course on high.
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Seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied.
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It is necessary to have regard to the person whom we wish to persuade, of whom we must know the mind and the heart, what principles he acknowledges, what things he loves; and then observe in the thing in question what affinity it has with the acknowledged principles, or with the objects so delightful by the pleasure which they give him.
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Civil wars are the greatest of evils. They are inevitable, if we wish to reward merit, for all will say that they are meritorious.
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Reason is the slow and torturous method by which those who do not know the truth discover it.
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All is one, all is different. How many natures exist in man? How many vocations? And by what chance does each man ordinarily choose what he has heard praised?
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To go beyond the bounds of moderation is to outrage humanity. The greatness of the human soul is shown by knowing how to keep within proper bounds. There are two equally dangerous extremes- to shut reason out, and not to let nothing in.
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A few rules include all that is necessary for the perfection of the definitions, the axioms, and the demonstrations, and consequently of the entire method of the geometrical proofs of the art of persuading.