Blaise Pascal Quotes
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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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Great and small suffer the same mishaps.
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The gospel to me is simply irresistible.
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All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.
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Fear not, provided you fear; but if you fear not, then fear.
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Passion cannot be beautiful without excess; one either loves too much or not enough.
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We have so exalted a notion of the human soul that we cannot bear to be despised, or even not to be esteemed by it. Man, in fact, places all his happiness in this esteem.
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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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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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The mind has its arrangement; it proceeds from principles to demonstrations. The heart has a different mode of proceeding.
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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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Unless we love the truth we cannot know it.
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The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.
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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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We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us from seeing it.
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One must have deeper motives and judge everything accordingly, but go on talking like an ordinary person.
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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 method of not erring is sought by all the world. The logicians profess to guide it, the geometricians alone attain it, and apart from science, and the imitations of it, there are no true demonstrations.
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To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.
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There is a God-shaped vacuum in every heart.
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Continued eloquence is wearisome.
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Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness... and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him.
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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.
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Pride counterbalances all our miseries, for it either hides them, or, if it discloses them, boasts of that disclosure. Pride has such a thorough possession of us, even in the midst of our miseries and faults, that we are prepared to sacrifice life with joy, if it may but be talked of.