We need not have the loftiest mind to understand that here is no lasting and real satisfaction, that our pleasures are only vanity, that our evils are infinite, and, lastly, that death, which threatens us every moment, must infallibly place us within a few years under the dreadful necessity of being forever either annihilated or unhappy.
Blaise PascalAll men naturally hate each other. We have used concupiscence as best we can to make it serve the common good, but this is mere sham and a false image of charity, for essentially it is just hate.
Blaise PascalThose who write against vanity want the glory of having written well, and their readers the glory of reading well, and I who write this have the same desire, as perhaps those who read this have also.
Blaise PascalNothing is so important to man as his own state; nothing is so formidable to him as eternity. And thus it is unnatural that thereshould be men indifferent to the loss of their existence and to the perils of everlasting suffering.
Blaise PascalThe secrets of nature are concealed; her agency is perpetual, but we do not always discover its effects; time reveals them from age to age; and although she is always the same in herself, she is not always equally well known.
Blaise PascalOne must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.
Blaise PascalWe should seek the truth without hesitation; and, if we refuse it, we show that we value the esteem of men more than the search for truth.
Blaise PascalIf we do not know ourselves to be full of pride, ambition, lust, weakness, misery, and injustice, we are indeed blind. And if, knowing this, we do not desire deliverance, what can we say of a man...?
Blaise PascalIt is certain that the soul is either mortal or immortal. The decision of this question must make a total difference in the principles of morals. Yet philosophers have arranged their moral system entirely independent of this. What an extraordinary blindness!
Blaise PascalThere are only three types of people; those who have found God and serve him; those who have not found God and seek him, and those who live not seeking, or finding him. The first are rational and happy; the second unhappy and rational, and the third foolish and unhappy.
Blaise PascalIl n'est pas certain que tout soit incertain. (Translation: It is not certain that everything is uncertain.)
Blaise PascalEloquence is a painting of thought; and thus those who, after having painted it, add something more, make a picture instead of a portrait.
Blaise PascalWithout [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.
Blaise PascalThe present is never the mark of our designs. We use both past and present as our means and instruments, but the future only as our object and aim.
Blaise PascalIf we must not act save on a certainty, we ought not to act on religion, for it is not certain. But how many things we do on an uncertainty, sea voyages, battles!
Blaise PascalPride 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.
Blaise PascalLet man then contemplate the whole of nature in her full and grand majesty... No idea approaches it. We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.
Blaise PascalIt is your own assent to yourself, and the constant voice of your own reason, and not of others, that should make you believe.
Blaise PascalLet us now speak according to natural lights. If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible. . . . We are then incapable of knowing of either what He is or if He is. . . .
Blaise PascalFashion is a tyrant from which nothing frees us. We must suit ourselves to its fantastic tastes. But being compelled to live under its foolish laws, the wise man is never the first to follow, nor the last to keep it.
Blaise PascalIt has pleased God that divine verities should not enter the heart through the understanding, but the understanding through the heart.
Blaise PascalA man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once.
Blaise PascalThe multitude which is not brought to act as a unity, is confusion. That unity which has not its origin in the multitude is tyranny.
Blaise PascalJesus was in a garden, not of delight as the first Adam, in which he destroyed himself and the whole human race, but in one of agony, in which he saved himself and the whole human race.
Blaise PascalAll the dignity of man consists in thought. Thought is therefore by its nature a wonderful and incomparable thing. It must have strange defects to be contemptible. But it has such, so that nothing is more ridiculous. How great it is in its nature! How vile it is in its defects! But what is this thought? How foolish it is!
Blaise PascalAll the troubles of life come upon us because we refuse to sit quietly for a while each day in our rooms.
Blaise Pascal