Blaise Pascal Quotes
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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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Nature, which alone is good, is wholly familiar and common.
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Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.
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We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.
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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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Rules necessary for demonstrations. To prove all propositions, and to employ nothing for their proof but axioms fully evident of themselves, or propositions already demonstrated or admitted; Never to take advantage of the ambiguity of terms by failing mentally to substitute definitions that restrict or explain them.
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Death itself is less painful when it comes upon us unawares than the bare contemplation of it, even when danger is far distant.
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One-half of the ills of life come because men are unwilling to sit down quietly for thirty minutes to think through all the possible consequences of their acts.
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The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.
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The last advance of reason is to recognize that it is surpassed by innumerable things; it is feeble if it cannot realize that.
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Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true. The cure for this is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next make it attractive, make good men wish it were true and then show that it is.
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Look somewhere else for someone who can follow you in your researches about numbers. For my part, I confess that they are far beyond me, and I am competent only to admire them.
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The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.
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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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Silence is the greatest persecution; never do the saints keep themselves silent.
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Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason.
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Man governs himself more by impulse than reason.
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There would be too great darkness, if truth had not visible signs.
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Man's grandeur is that he knows himself to be miserable.
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I can readily conceive of a man without hands or feet; and I could conceive of him without a head, if experience had not taught me that by this he thinks, Thought then, is the essence of man, and without this we cannot conceive of him.
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It is dangerous to tell the people that the laws are unjust; for they obey them only because they think them just. Therefore it isnecessary to tell them at the same time that they must obey them because they are laws, just as they must obey superiors, not because they are just, but because they are superiors. In this way all sedition is prevented.
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To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.
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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.