Blaise Pascal Quotes
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If you act externally with men in conformity with your rank, you should recognize, by a more secret but truer thought, that you have nothing naturally superior to them.
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Passion cannot be beautiful without excess; one either loves too much or not enough.
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There are two types of mind . . . the mathematical, and what might be called the intuitive. The former arrives at its views slowly, but they are firm and rigid; the latter is endowed with greater flexibility and applies itself simultaneously to the diverse lovable parts of that which it loves.
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There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.
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There are plenty of maxims in the world; all that remains is to apply them.
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What part of us feels pleasure? Is it our hand, our arm, our flesh, or our blood? It must obviously be something immaterial.
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I do not admire a virtue like valour when it is pushed to excess, if I do not see at the same time the excess of the opposite virtue, as one does in Epaminondas, who displayed extreme valour and extreme benevolence. For otherwise it is not an ascent, but a fall. We do not display our greatness by placing ourselves at one extremity, but rather by being at both at the same time, and filling up the whole of the space between them.
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God only pours out his light into the mind after having subdued the rebellion of the will by an altogether heavenly gentleness which charms and wins it.
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A little thing comforts us because a little thing afflicts us.
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The weakness of human reason appears more evidently in those who know it not than in those who know it.
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If ignorance were bliss, he'd be a blister.
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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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We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us from seeing it.
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Man's sensitivity to the little things and insensitivity to the greatest are the signs of a strange disorder.
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The only shame is to have none.
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We must kill them in war, just because they live beyond the river. If they lived on this side, we would be called murderers.
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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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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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There is nothing that we can see on earth which does not either show the wretchedness of man or the mercy of God. One either sees the powerlessness of man without God, or the strength of man with God.
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[On vanity:] The nose of Cleopatra: if it had been shorter, the face of the earth would have changed.
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The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.
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These five rules above form all that is necessary to render proofs convincing, immutable, and to say all, geometrical; and the eight rules together render them even more perfect.
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It is necessary to show that there is nothing so little known as the above rules, nothing more difficult to practice, or nothing more useful and universal.
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The captain of a ship is not chosen from those of the passengers who comes from the best family.