Blaise Pascal Quotes
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Our senses will not admit anything extreme. Too much noise confuses us, too much light dazzles us, too great distance or nearness prevents vision, too great prolixity or brevity weakens an argument, too much pleasure gives pain, too much accordance annoys.
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How I hate this folly of not believing in the Eucharist, etc.! If the gospel be true, if Jesus Christ be God, what difficulty is there?
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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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Not the zeal alone of those who seek Him proves God, but the blindness of those who seek Him not.
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If men knew themselves, God would heal and pardon them.
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There is a God-shaped hole in the life of every man.
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Either God exists or He doesn't. Either I believe in God or I don't. Of the four possibilities, only one is to my disadvantage. To avoid that possibility, I believe in God.
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For as old age is that period of life most remote from infancy, who does not see that old age in this universal man ought not to be sought in the times nearest his birth, but in those most remote from it?
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One has followed the other in an endless circle, for it is certain that as man's insight increases so he finds both wretchedness and greatness within himself. In a word man knows he is wretched. Thus he is wretched because he is so, but he is truly great because he knows it.
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Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being.
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The sensitivity of men to small matters, and their indifference to great ones, indicates a strange inversion.
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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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To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize.
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Good deeds, when concealed, are the most admirable.
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Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much.
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Which is the more believable of the two, Moses or China?
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All the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.
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To ridicule philosophy is truly philosophical. [Fr., Se moquer de la philosophie c'est vraiment philosophe.]
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Human life is thus only a perpetual illusion; men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does of us in our absence. Human society is founded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each knew what his friend said of him in his absence, although he then spoke in sincerity and without passion.
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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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Happiness can be found neither in ourselves nor in external things, but in God and in ourselves as united to him.
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Those great efforts of intellect, upon which the mind sometimes touches, are such that it cannot maintain itself there. It only leaps to them, not as upon a throne, forever, but merely for an instant.
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Nature has some perfections to show that she is the image of God, and some defects to show that she is only His image.
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The weakness of human reason appears more evidently in those who know it not than in those who know it.