Blaise Pascal Quotes
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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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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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All our reasoning boils down to yielding to sentiment.
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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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I make no doubt... that these rules are simple, artless, and natural.
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A man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once.
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All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.
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Muhammad established a religion by putting his enemies to death; Jesus Christ by commanding his followers to lay down their lives.
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The mind has its arrangement; it proceeds from principles to demonstrations. The heart has a different mode of proceeding.
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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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Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.
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Christian piety annihilates the egoism of the heart; worldly politeness veils and represses it.
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What is it, in your opinion, to be a great nobleman? It is to be master of several objects that men covet, and thus to be able to satisfy the wants and the desires of many. It is these wants and these desires that attract them towards you, and that make them submit to you: were it not for these, they would not even look at you; but they hope, by these services... to obtain from you some part of the good which they desire, and of which they see that you have the disposal.
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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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Pride counterbalances all our miseries, for it either hides them, or, if it discloses them, boasts of that disclosure. Pride has such a thorough possession of us, even in the midst of our miseries and faults, that we are prepared to sacrifice life with joy, if it may but be talked of.
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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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All mankind's troubles are caused by one single thing, which is their inability to sit quietly.
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Orthodoxy on one side of the Pyrenees may be heresy on the other.
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When we would show any one that he is mistaken, our best course is to observe on what side he considers the subject,--for his view of if is generally right on this side,--and admit to him that he is right so far. He will be satisfied with this acknowledgment, that he was not wrong in his judgment, but only inadvertent in not looking at the whole case.
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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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Rules necessary for axioms. Not to demand in axioms any but things perfectly evident.
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These eight rules above contain all the precepts for solid and immutable proofs.
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Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.