Blaise Pascal Quotes
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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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La dernie' re chose qu'on trouve en faisant un ouvrage, est de savoir celle qu'il faut mettre la premie' re. The last thing one discovers in composing a work iswhat to put first.
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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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Unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just.
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The exterior must be joined to the interior to obtain anything from God, that is to say, we must kneel, pray with the lips, and soon, in order that proud man, who would not submit himself to God, may be now subject to the creature.
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All men have happiness as their object: there is no exception. However different the means they employ, they all aim at the same end.
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To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.
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A little thing comforts us because a little thing afflicts us.
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Desire and force between them are responsible for all our actions; desire causes our voluntary acts, force our involuntary.
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Kind words produce their own image in men's souls; and a beautiful image it is. They soothe and quiet and comfort the hearer. They shame him out of his sour, morose, unkind feelings. We have not yet begun to use kind words in such abundance as they ought to be used.
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It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist.
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It is not certain that everything is uncertain.
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The sole cause of all human misery is the inability of people to sit quietly in their rooms.
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There is a God-shaped vacuum in every heart.
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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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It is certain that those who have the living faith in their hearts see at once that all existence is none other than the work of the God whom they adore. But for those in whom this light is extinguished, [if we were to show them our proofs of the existence of God] nothing is more calculated to arouse their contempt. . . .
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Great and small suffer the same mishaps.
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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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If they [Plato and Aristotle] wrote about politics it was as if to lay down rules for a madhouse. And if they pretended to treat it as something really important it was because they knew that the madmen they were talking to believed themselves to be kings and emperors. They humored these beliefs in order to calm down their madness with as little harm as possible.
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The consciousness of the falsity of present pleasures, and the ignorance of the vanity of absent pleasures, cause inconstancy.
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The authority of reason is far more imperious than that of a master; for he who disobeys the one is unhappy, but he who disobeys the other is a fool.
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Continuous eloquence wearies.
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If we do not secure the foundation, we cannot secure the edifice.
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Symmetry is what we see at a glance; based on the fact that there is no reason for any difference.