Blaise Pascal Quotes

Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves.

Montaigne is wrong in declaring that custom ought to be followed simply because it is custom, and not because it is reasonable or just.

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.

Those honor nature well, who teach that she can speak on everything...

Those are weaklings who know the truth and uphold it as long as it suits their purpose, and then abandon it.

Our senses perceive no extreme. Too much sound deafens us; too much light dazzles us; too great distance or proximity hinders ourview. Too great length and too great brevity of discourse tends to obscurity; too much truth is paralyzing.... In short, extremes are for us as though they were not, and we are not within their notice. They escape us, or we them.

Extremes are for us as though they were not, and we are not within their notice. They escape us, or we them. This is our true state; this is what makes us incapable of certain knowledge and of absolute ignorance... This is our natural condition, and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses.

There is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition

Notwithstanding the sight of all our miseries, which press upon us and take us by the throat, we have an instinct which we cannot repress, and which lifts us up.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

If you believe in God you are at no disadvantage in this life, and at considerable advantage in the next. If you do not believe, but find in the next that there was a next, you are most unfortunate!

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

Anyone who does not see the vanity of the world is very vain himself. So who does not see it, apart from young people whose lives are all noise, diversions, and thoughts for the future? But take away their diversion and you will see them bored to extinction. Then they feel their nullity without recognizing it, for nothing could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion.

Voluptuousness, like justice, is blind, but that is the only resemblance between them.

All evil stems from this-that we do. Know how to handle your solitude.

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

We know then the existence and nature of the finite, because we also are finite and have extension. We know the existence of the infinite and are ignorant of its nature, because it has extension like us, but not limits like us. But we know neither the existence nor the nature of God, because he has neither extension nor limits.

All that tends not to charity is figurative. The sole aim of the Scripture is charity.

Law, without force, is impotent.

We are not satisfied with real life; we want to live some imaginary life in the eyes of other people and to seem different from what we actually are.

If God exists, not seeking God must be the gravest error imaginable. If one decides to sincerely seek for God and doesn't find God, the lost effort is negligible in comparison to what is at risk in not seeking God in the first place.

I condemn equally those who choose to praise man, those who choose to condemn him and those who choose to divert themselves, and I can only approve of those who seek with groans.

No animal admires another animal.

Silence. All human unhappiness comes from not knowing how to stay quietly in a room.

There are plenty of maxims in the world; all that remains is to apply them.

If men knew themselves, God would heal and pardon them.

Not only do we know God through Jesus Christ, we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ.

There are two kinds of people one can call reasonable: those who serve God with all their heart because they know him, and those who seek him with all their heart because they do not know him.

There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

Man governs himself more by impulse than reason

Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much.

That queen, of error, whom we call fancy and opinion, is the more deceitful because she does not always deceive. She would be the infallible rule of truth if she were the infallible rule of falsehood; but being only most frequently in error, she gives no evidence of her real quality, for she marks with the same character both that which is true and that which is false.

All our reasoning boils down to yielding to sentiment.

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?

What reason have atheists for saying that we cannot rise again? That what has never been, should be, or that what has been, should be again? Is it more difficult to come into being than to return to it.

All sorrow has its root in man's inability to sit quiet in a room by himself.

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

Man is so made that by continually telling him he is a fool he believes it, and by continually telling it to himself he makes himself believe it. For man holds an inward talk with himself, which it pays him to regulate.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

To find recreation in amusement is not happiness.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room.

What matters it that man should have a little more knowledge of the universe? If he has it, he gets little higher. Is he not always infinitely removed from the end, and is not the duration of our life equally removed from eternity, even if it lasts ten years longer?

You always admire what you really don't understand.

We are only troubled by the fears which we, and not nature, give ourselves, for they add to the state in which we are the passions of the state in which we are not.

Happiness can be found neither in ourselves nor in external things, but in God and in ourselves as united to him.

One must have deeper motives and judge everything accordingly, but go on talking like an ordinary person.

Generally we are occupied either with the miseries which now we feel, or with those which threaten; and even when we see ourselves sufficiently secure from the approach of either, still fretfulness, though unwarranted by either present or expected affliction, fails not to spring up from the deep recesses of the heart, where its roots naturally grow, and to fill the soul with its poison.