Blaise Pascal Quotes
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If ignorance were bliss, he'd be a blister.
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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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Passion cannot be beautiful without excess; one either loves too much or not enough.
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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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Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he feels his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness.
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A little thing comforts us because a little thing afflicts us.
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God is, or He is not." But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager?
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To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize.
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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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Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.
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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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Unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just.
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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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The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.
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The only shame is to have none.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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One-half of life is admitted by us to be passed in sleep, in which, however, it may appear otherwise, we have no perception of truth, and all our feelings are delusions; who knows but the other half of life, in which we think we are awake, is a sleep also, but in some respects different from the other, and from which we wake when we, as we call it, sleep. As a man dreams often that he is dreaming, crowding one dreamy delusion on another.
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The Christian religion teaches me two points-that there is a God whom men can know, and that their nature is so corrupt that they are unworthy of Him.
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If he exalts himself, I humble him. If he humbles himself, I exalt him. And I go on contradicting him Until he understands That he is a monster that passes all understanding.