Blaise Pascal Quotes

The man who knows God but does not know his own misery, becomes proud. The man who knows his own misery but does not know God, ends in despair ... the knowledge of Jesus Christ constitutes the middle course because in him we find both God and our own misery. Jesus Christ is therefore a God whom we approach without pride, and before whom we humble ourselves without despair.

They say that eclipses are portents of disaster, because disasters are so common, and misfortune occurs often enough for these forecasts to be right, whereas if they said that eclipses were portents of good fortune they would often be wrong.

Good deeds, when concealed, are the most admirable.

I cannot judge my work while I am doing it. I have to do as painters do, stand back and view it from a distance, but not too great a distance. How great? Guess.

As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.

Nothing 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.

La dernière chose qu'on trouve en faisant un ouvrage est de savoir celle qu'il faut mettre la première. (The last thing one settles in writing a book is what one should put in first.)

Atheists. What grounds have they for saying that no one can rise from the dead? Which is harder, to be born or to rise again? That what has never been should be, or that what has been should be once more? Is it harder to come into existence than to come back? Habit makes us find the one easy, while lack of habit makes us find the other impossible.

Earthly things must be known to be loved; heavenly things must be loved to be known.

We make an idol of truth itself, for truth apart from charity is not God, but his image and an idol that we must not love or worship.

Nothing is as approved as mediocrity, the majority has established it and it fixes its fangs on whatever gets beyond it either way.

To scorn philosophy is truly to philosophize.

No one is ignorant that there are two avenues by which opinions are received into the soul, which are its two principal powers: the understanding and the will.

There should be in eloquence that which is pleasing and that which is real; but that which is pleasing should itself be real.

Habit is a second nature thta destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

A town, a landscape are when seen from afar a town and a landscape; but as one gets nearer, there are houses, trees, tiles leaves, grasses, ants, legs of ants and so on to infinity. All this is subsumed under the name of landscape.

There are two types of mind ... the mathematical, and what might be called the intuitive. The former arrives at its views slowly, but they are firm and rigid; the latter is endowed with greater flexibility and applies itself simultaneously to the diverse lovable parts of that which it loves.

Those we call the ancients were really new in everything.

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.

Jesus Christ and St Paul possess the order of charity, not of the mind, for they wished to humble, not to teach.

Excuse me, pray. Without that excuse I would not have known there was anything amiss.

All 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.

Nothing strengthens the case for scepticism more than the fact that there are people who are not sceptics. If they all were, they would be wrong.

Force and not opinion is the queen of the world; but it is opinion that uses the force.
[Fr., La force est la reine du monde, et non pas l'opinion; mais l'opinion est celle qui use de la force.]

it is so inevitable that men will be fools that it is only by another shift of folly that one might not be

We must learn our limits. We are all something, but none of us are everything.

Piety is different from superstition. To carry piety to the extent of superstition is to destroy it. The heretics reproach us with this superstitious submission. It is doing what they reproach us with.

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

Since [man's] true nature has been lost, anything can become his nature: similarly, true good being lost, anything can become his true good.

What reason for vanity in being plunged into impenetrable darkness?

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

(Man,) the glory and the scandal of the universe.

It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.

When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which precedes and will succeed it - memoria hospitis unius diei praetereuntis (remembrance of a guest who tarried but a day) - the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? By whose command and act were this place and time allotted to me?

The true religion would have to teach greatness and wretchedness, inspire self-esteem and self-contempt, love and hate.

Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for miseries and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.

Man is neither angel nor beast.

The last proceeding of reason is to recognize that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it. There is nothing so conformable to reason as this disavowal of reason.

The arithmetical machine produces effects that approach nearer to thought than all the actions of animals. But it does nothing that would enable us to attribute will to it, as to the animals.

Le silence est la plus grande perse cution: jamais les saints ne se sont tus. Silence is the greatest of all persecutions: no saint was ever silent.

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.

Continuous eloquence wearies. Grandeur must be abandoned to be appreciated. Continuity in everything is unpleasant. Cold is agreeable, that we may get warm.

To go beyond the bounds of moderation is to outrage humanity.

Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature! Learn that man infinitely transcends man, hear from your master your true condition, which is unknown to you.

The consciousness of the falsity of present pleasures, and the ignorance of the vanity of absent pleasures, cause inconstancy.

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

The charm of fame is so great, that we like every object to which it is attached, even death.

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

We must kill them in war, just because they live beyond the river. If they lived on this side, we would be called murderers.

All their principles are true, sceptics, stoics, atheists, etc...but their conclusions are false, because the contrary principles are also true.

Those who profess contempt for men, and put them on a level with beasts, yet wish to be admired and believed by men, and contradict themselves by their own feelings
their nature, which is stronger than all, convincing them of the greatness of man more forcibly than reason convinces them of his baseness.

Must we kill to prevent there being any wicked? This is to make both parties wicked instead of one.

It is not possible to have reasonable grounds for not believing in miracles.

Justice, might. - It is right that what is just should be obeyed; it is necessary that what is strongest should be obeyed. Justice without might is helpless; might without justice is tyrannical. Justice without might is gainsaid, because there are always offenders; might without justice is condemned. We must then combine justice and might, and for this end make what is just strong, or what is strong just.
Justice is subject to dispute; might is easily recognised and is not disputed. So we cannot give might to justice, because might has gainsaid justice, and has declared that it is she herself who is just. And thus being unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just.

Mediocrity makes the most of its native possessions.

There are two excesses: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason. The supreme achievement of reason is to realise that there is a limit to reason. Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go as far as to realise that.

The last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it.

The sensitivity of men to small matters, and their indifference to great ones, indicates a strange inversion.

When we come across a natural style, we are surprised and delighted; for we expected an author, and we
find a man.

Let it not be imagined that the life of a good Christian must be a life of melancholy and gloominess; for he only resigns some pleasures to enjoy others infinitely better.

We do not sustain ourselves in virtue by our own strength, but by the balancing of two opposed vices, just as we remain upright amidst two contrary gales. Remove one of the vices, and we fall into the other.

We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.

The two principles of truth, reason and senses, are not only both not genuine, but are engaged in mutual deception. The senses deceive reason through false appearances, and the senses are disturbed by passions, which produce false impressions.

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.

This dog is mine," said those poor children; "that is my place in the sun." Here is the beginning and the image of the usurpation of all the earth.

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.

To make a man a saint, it must indeed be by grace; and whoever doubts this does not know what a saint is, or a man.

We do not weary of eating and sleeping every day, for hunger and sleepiness recur. Without that we should weary of them. So, without the hunger for spiritual things, we weary of them. Hunger after righteousness
the eighth beatitude.

Our imagination so magnifies this present existence, by the power of continual reflection on it, and so attenuates eternity, by not thinking of it at all, that we reduce an eternity to nothingness, and expand a mere nothing to an eternity; and this habit is so inveterately rooted in us that all the force of reason cannot induce us to lay it aside.

Since we cannot be universal and know all that is to be known of everything, we ought to know a little about everything. For it is far better to know something about everything than to know all about one thing.

Reverend Fathers, my letters did not usually follow each other at such close intervals, nor were they so long ... This one would not be so long had I but the leisure to make it shorter.

When a man who accepts the Christian doctrine lives unworthily of it, it is much clearer to say he is a bad Christian than to say he is not a Christian.

For it is beyond doubt that there is nothing which more shocks our reason than to say that the sin of the first man has rendered guilty those, who, being so removed from this source, seem incapable of participation in it. This transmission does not only seem to us impossible, it seems also very unjust. For what is more contrary to the rules of our miserable justice than to damn eternally an infant incapable of will, for a sin wherein he seems to have so little a share, that it was committed six thousand years before he was in existence? Certainly nothing offends us more rudely than this doctrine; and yet, without this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we are incomprehensible to ourselves. The knot of our condition takes its twists and turns in this abyss, so that man is more inconceivable without this mystery than this mystery is inconceivable to man.

We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is the present usually hurts.

How can anyone lose who chooses to become a Christian? If, when he dies, there turns out to be no God and his faith was in vain, he has lost nothing ... If, however, there is a God and a heaven and a hell. then he has gained heaven and his skeptical friends have lost everything ...

Amusement that is excessive and followed only for its own sake, allures and deceives us.

The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

We are fools to depend upon the society of our fellow-men. Wretched as we are, powerless as we are, they will not aid us; we shall die alone.

Man is neither angel nor beast, and it is unfortunately the case that anyone trying to act the angel acts the beast.

It is your own assent to yourself, and the constant voice of your own reason, and not of others, that should make you believe.

The more I see of Mankind, the more I prefer my dog.

If ignorance were bliss, he'd be a blister

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?

We like security: we like the pope to be infallible in matters of faith, and grave doctors to be so in moral questions so that we can feel reassured.

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

To deny, to believe, and to doubt well, are to a man what the race is to a horse.

Nature imitates herself. A grain thrown into good ground brings forth fruit; a principle thrown into a good mind brings forth fruit. Everything is created and conducted by the same Master-the root, the branch, the fruits-the principles, the consequences.

If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then, without hesitation, that He exsists.

The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play

The sole cause of all human misery is the inability of people to sit quietly in their rooms.

Faith embraces many truths which seem to contradict each other.

When you say that Christ did not die for all men, you are abusing a weakness of men, who at once apply this exception to themselves, and this encourages despair, instead of turning them away from it to encourage hope.

Eloquence. - We need both what is pleasing and what is real, but that which pleases must itself be drawn from the true.

L'on a beau se cacher a' soi-me me, l'on aime toujours. We vainly conceal from ourselves the fact that we are always in love.

A man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once.

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

That a religion may be true, it must have knowledge of our nature.

Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it.

The sole case of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room

Death itself is less painful when it comes upon us unawares than the bare contemplation of it, even when danger is far distant.