Blaise Pascal Quotes
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Orthodoxy on one side of the Pyrenees may be heresy on the other.
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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.
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To ridicule philosophy is truly philosophical. [Fr., Se moquer de la philosophie c'est vraiment philosophe.]
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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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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 manner in which Epictetus, Montaigne, and Salomon de Tultie wrote, is the most usual, the most suggestive, the most remembered, and the oftener quoted; because it is entirely composed of thoughts born from the common talk of life.
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Faith embraces many truths which seem to contradict each other.
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This right which you have, is not founded any more than his upon any quality or any merit in yourself which renders you worthy of it. Your soul and your body are, of themselves, indifferent to the state of boatman or that of duke; and there is no natural bond that attaches them to one condition rather than to another.
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Rules necessary for definitions. Not to leave any terms at all obscure or ambiguous without definition; Not to employ in definitions any but terms perfectly known or already explained.
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Rules for Axioms. I. Not to omit any necessary principle without asking whether it is admittied, however clear and evident it may be. II. Not to demand, in axioms, any but things that are perfectly evident in themselves.
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As soon as the soul has been made to perceive that a thing can conduct it to that which it loves supremely, it must inevitably embrace it with joy.
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The sensitivity of men to small matters, and their indifference to great ones, indicates a strange inversion.
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No one is ignorant that there are two avenues by which opinions are received into the soul, which are its two principal powers: the understanding and the will.
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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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At the centre of every human being is a God-shaped vacuum which can only be filled by Jesus Christ.
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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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Rules necessary for axioms. Not to demand in axioms any but things perfectly evident.
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We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.
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Nature has some perfections to show that she is the image of God, and some defects to show that she is only His image.
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The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.
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I make no doubt... that these rules are simple, artless, and natural.
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Thus he had a double thought: the one by which he acted as king, the other by which he recognized his true state, and that it was accident alone that had placed him in his present condition.
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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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We see neither justice nor injustice which does not change its nature with change in climate. Three degrees of latitude reverse all jurisprudence; a meridian decides the truth.