Blaise Pascal Quotes

Now, if the passions had no hold on us, a week and a hundred years would amount to the same.

Instead of complaining that God had hidden himself, you will give Him thanks for having revealed so much of Himself.

Men are so completely fools by necessity that he is but a fool in a higher strain of folly who does not confess his foolishness.

Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.

Love has no age as it is always renewing itself.

Knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride. Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair. Knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance because he shows us both God and our own wretchedness.

All the maxims have been written. It only remains to put them into practice.

Ugly deeds are most estimable when hidden.

There are three means of believing--by inspiration, by reason, and by custom. Christianity, which is the only rational institution, does yet admit none for its sons who do not believe by inspiration. Nor does it injure reason or custom, or debar them of their proper force; on the contrary, it directs us to open our minds by the proofs of the former, and to confirm our minds by the authority of the latter.

The knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him.

It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason.

The only shame is to have none.

What a difficult thing it is to ask someone's advice on a matter without coloring his judgment by the way in which we present our problem.

The last act is bloody, however pleasant all the rest of the play is: a little earth is thrown at last upon our head, and that is the end forever.

Equality of possessions is no doubt right, but, as men could not make might obey right, they have made right obey might.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

If our condition were truly happy, we would not need diversion from thinking of it in order to make ourselves happy.

Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light is throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.

The heart has arguments with which the logic of mind is not aquainted.

Muhammad established a religion by putting his enemies to death; Jesus Christ by commanding his followers to lay down their lives.

Imagination cannot make fools wise, but it makes them happy, as against reason, which only makes its friends wretched: one covers them with glory, the other with shame.

Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair.

We never live, but we hope to live; and as we are always arranging to be happy, it must be that we never are so.

We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves.

Our true dignity consists — in thought. Thence we must derive our elevation, not from space or duration. Let us endeavor then to think well; this is the principle of morals.

Men blaspheme what they do not know.

Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars. I will not forget thy word. Amen.

We must know where to doubt, where to feel certain, where to submit. He who does not do so, understands not the force of reason.

Too much pleasure disagrees with us. Too many concords are annoying in music; too many benefits irritate us; we wish to have the wherewithal to overpay our debts.

Men seek rest in a struggle against difficulties; and when they have conquered these, rest becomes insufferable.

The serene, silent beauty of a holy life is the most powerful influence in the world, next to the night of God.

Men often take their imagination for their heart; and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.

Kind words do not cost much. They never blister the tongue or lips. They make other people good-natured. They also produce their own image on men's souls, and a beautiful image it is.

The truth about nature we discover with our brains. The truth about religion we discover with our hearts.

When we would think of God, how many things we find which turn us away from Him, and tempt us to think otherwise. All this is evil, yet it is innate.

When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before.

We desire truth, and find within ourselves only uncertainty. We seek happiness, and find only misery and death. We cannot but desire truth and happiness, and are incapable of certainty or happiness.

God has given us evidence sufficiently clear to convince those with an open heart and mind.

We conceal it from ourselves in vain - we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.

Whilst in speaking of human things, we say that it is necessary to know them before we love can them. The saints on the contrary say in speaking of divine things that it is necessary to love them in order to know them, and that we only enter truth through charity.

Custom determines what is agreeable.

When we do not know the truth of a thing, it is good that there should exist a common error which determines the mind of man, as, for example, the moon, to which is attributed the change of seasons, the progress of diseases, etc. For the chief malady of man is a restless curiosity about things which he cannot understand; and it is not so bad for him to be in error as to be curious to no purpose.

The Fall is an offense to human reason, but once accepted, it makes perfect sense of the human condition.

Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he feels his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness.

Apart from Jesus Christ, we do not know what is our life, nor our death, nor God, nor ourselves.

Everything that is incomprehensible does not, however, cease to exist.

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?

Everything that is written merely to please the author is worthless.