Blaise Pascal Quotes
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Anyone who does not see the vanity of the world is very vain himself. So who does not see it, apart from young people whose lives are all noise, diversions, and thoughts for the future? But take away their diversion and you will see them bored to extinction. Then they feel their nullity without recognizing it, for nothing could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion.
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The method of not erring is sought by all the world. The logicians profess to guide it, the geometricians alone attain it, and apart from science, and the imitations of it, there are no true demonstrations.
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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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All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.
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The only thing which consoles for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries. For it is this which principally hinders us from reflecting upon ourselves and which makes us imperceptibly ruin ourselves.
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For as old age is that period of life most remote from infancy, who does not see that old age in this universal man ought not to be sought in the times nearest his birth, but in those most remote from it?
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Brave deeds are wasted when hidden.
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Mankind suffers from two excesses: to exclude reason, and to live by nothing but reason.
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Justice is what is established; and thus all our established laws will necessarily be regarded as just without examination, since they are established.
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I make no doubt... that these rules are simple, artless, and natural.
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All our reasoning boils down to yielding to sentiment.
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We are so presumptuous that we should like to be known all over the world, even by people who will only come when we are no more. Such is our vanity that the good opinion of half a dozen of the people around us gives us pleasure and satisfaction.
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Rivers are roads which move, and which carry us whither we desire to go.
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At the centre of every human being is a God-shaped vacuum which can only be filled by Jesus Christ.
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Quand on voit le style naturel, on est tout e tonne et ravi, car on s'attendait de voir un auteur, et on trouve un homme. When we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted, because we expected to see an author and find a man.
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Discourses on humility are a source of pride in the vain and of humility in the humble. So those on scepticism cause believers to affirm. Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, few doubtingly of scepticism.
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We do not weary of eating and sleeping every day, for hunger and sleepiness recur. Without that we should weary of them. So, without the hunger for spiritual things, we weary of them. Hunger after righteousness--the eighth beatitude.
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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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Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.
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Which is the more believable of the two, Moses or China?
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We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.
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We must make good people wish that the Christian faith were true, and then show that it is.
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Orthodoxy on one side of the Pyrenees may be heresy on the other.
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Of the truths within our reach... the mind and the heart are as doors by which they are received into the soul, but... few enter by the mind, whilst they are brought in crowds by the rash caprices of the will, without the council of reason.