Blaise Pascal Quotes
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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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Fear not, provided you fear; but if you fear not, then fear.
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All men seek happiness. There are no exceptions.... This is the motive of every act of every man, including those who go and hang themselves.
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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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All men are almost led to believe not of proof, but by attraction. This way is base, ignoble, and irrelevant; every one therefore disavows it. Each one professes to believe and even to love nothing but what he knows to be worthy of belief and love.
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How comes it that a cripple does not offend us, but a fool does? Because a cripple recognizes that we walk straight, whereas a fool declares that it is we who are silly; if it were not so, we should feel pity and not anger.
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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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Faith embraces many truths which seem to contradict each other.
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Which is the more believable of the two, Moses or China?
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There is a God-shaped hole in the life of every man.
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Nothing fortifies scepticism more than that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.
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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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It is right that what is just should be obeyed. It is necessary that what is strongest should be obeyed.
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Human life is thus only an endless illusion. Men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does when we are gone. Society is based on mutual hypocrisy.
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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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Logic has borrowed, perhaps, the rules of geometry, without comprehending their force... it does not thence follow that they have entered into the spirit of geometry, and I should be greatly averse... to placing them on a level with that science that teaches the true method of directing reason.
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Our reason is always disappointed by the inconstancy of appearances.
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What a strange vanity painting is; it attracts admiration by resembling the original, we do not admire.
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If you want to be a real seeker of truth, you need to, at least once in your lifetime, doubt in, as much as it's possible, in everything.
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Continuous eloquence wearies.
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No one is discontented at not being a king except a discrowned king ... unhappiness almost invariably indicates the existence of a road not taken, a talent undeveloped, a self not recognized.
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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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[On vanity:] The nose of Cleopatra: if it had been shorter, the face of the earth would have changed.
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Without [diversion] we would be in a state of weariness, and this weariness would spur us on to seek a more solid means of escaping from it. But diversion amuses us, and leads us unconsciously to death.