Blaise Pascal quotes:

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.

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.

Man's greatness lies in his power of thought.

He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God's providence to lead him aright.

It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.

Jesus is the God whom we can approach without pride and before whom we can humble ourselves without despair.

The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.

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

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

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.

The strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts.

Atheism shows strength of mind, but only to a certain degree.

Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.

The weather and my mood have little connection. I have my foggy and my fine days within me; my prosperity or misfortune has little to do with the matter.

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't.

The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

Happiness is neither without us nor within us. It is in God, both without us and within us.

Two things control men's nature, instinct and experience.

Truly it is an evil to be full of faults; but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and to be unwilling to recognize them, since that is to add the further fault of a voluntary illusion.

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?

Justice and truth are too such subtle points that our tools are too blunt to touch them accurately.

Habit is a second nature that 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.

Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.

When we see a natural style, we are astonished and charmed; for we expected to see an author, and we find a person.

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.

Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.

Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them.

Vanity of science. Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science.

Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without a passion, without business, without entertainment, without care.

The immortality of the soul is a matter which is of so great consequence to us and which touches us so profoundly that we must have lost all feeling to be indifferent about it.

Faith embraces many truths which seem to contradict each other.

Faith is different from proof; the latter is human, the former is a Gift from God.

Too much and too little wine. Give him none, he cannot find truth; give him too much, the same.

Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.

It is good to be tired and wearied by the futile search after the true good, that we may stretch out our arms to the Redeemer.

There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.

The gospel to me is simply irresistible.

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

Faith indeed tells what the senses do not tell, but not the contrary of what they see. It is above them and not contrary to them.

Man's true nature being lost, everything becomes his nature; as, his true good being lost, everything becomes his good.

Human beings must be known to be loved; but Divine beings must be loved to be known.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.

We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike.

If 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!

Love has reasons which reason cannot understand.

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

We never love a person, but only qualities.

Through space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; through thought I comprehend the world.

To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

Knowlege of God without knowledge of man's wretchedness leads to pride. Knowledge of man's wretchedness without knowledge of God leads to despair. Knowledge of Jesus Christ is the middle course, because by it we discover both God and our wretched state.

Just as all things speak about God to those that know Him, and reveal Him to those that love Him, they also hide Him from all those that neither seek nor know Him.

This is how the whole of our life slips by. We seek repose by battling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome we find rest is unbearable because of the boredom it generates. We can't imaging a condition that is pleasant without fun and noise.

The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.

The heart has its order, the mind has its own, which uses principles and demonstrations. The heart has a different one. We do not prove that we ought to be loved by setting out in order the causes of love; that would be absurd.

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.

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

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

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

You always admire what you really don't understand.

You're basically killing each other to see who's got the better imaginary friend.

St. Augustine teaches us that there is in each man a Serpent, an Eve, and an Adam. Our senses and natural propensities are the Serpent; the excitable desire is the Eve; and reason is the Adam. Our nature tempts us perpetually; criminal desire is often excited; but sin is not completed till reason consents.

Caesar was too old, it seems to me, to go off and amuse himself conquering the world. Such a pastime was all right for Augustus and Alexander; they were young men, not easily held in check, but Caesar ought to have been more mature.

Quand on voit le style naturel, on est tout e tonne et ravi, car on s'attendait de voir un auteur, et on trouve un homme. When we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted, because we expected to see an author and find a man.

A jester, a bad character.

Anyone who found the secret of rejoicing when things go well without being annoyed when they go badly would have found the point.

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.

The captain of a ship is not chosen from those of the passengers who comes from the best family.

Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness... and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him.

If ignorance were bliss, he'd be a blister

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 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.

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.

Chess is the gymnasium of the mind.

What a chimera then is man. What a novelty! What a monster... what a contradiction, what a prodigy

Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what it loves.

That dog is mine said those poor children; that place in the sun is mine; such is the beginning and type of usurpation throughout the earth. [Fr., Ce chien est a moi, disaient ces pauvres enfants; c'est la ma place au soleil. Voila le commencement et l'image de l'usurpation de toute la terre.]

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.

Continuity in everything is unpleasant.

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

Noble deeds that are concealed are most esteemed.

From whence comes it that a cripple in body does not irritate us, and that a crippled mind enrages us? It is because a cripple sees that we go right, and a distorted mind says that it is we who go astray. But for that we should have more pity and less rage.

All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.

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

Reason commands us far more imperiously than a master; for in disobeying the one we are unfortunate, and in disobeying the other we are fools.

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

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.

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 sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.

Dull minds are never either intuitive or mathematical.

Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason.

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

The method of not erring is sought by all the world. The logicians profess to guide it, the geometricians alone attain it, and apart from science, and the imitations of it, there are no true demonstrations.

Our own interests are still an exquisite means for dazzling our eyes agreeably.

Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. Love still stands when all else has fallen.

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.

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

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

All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.

There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.

One 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.

I maintain that, if everyone knew what others said about him, there would not be four friends in the world.

I take it as a matter not to be disputed, that if all knew what each said of the other, there would not be four friends in the world. This seems proved by the quarrels and disputes caused by the disclosures which are occasionally made.

All men naturally hate one another. I hold it a fact, that if men knew exactly what one says of the other, there would not be four friends in the world.

The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.

If I believe in God and life after death and you do not, and if there is no God, we both lose when we die. However, if there is a God, you still lose and I gain everything.

I rather live as if God exists to find out that He doesn't than live as if he doesn't exist to find out He does.

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.

Quelque e tendue d'esprit que l'on ait, l'on n'est capable que d'une grande passion. However vast a man's spirit, he is only capable of one great passion.

If a soldier or labourer complain of the hardship of his lot, set him to do nothing.

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

Cold words freeze people, and hot words scorch them, and bitter words make them bitter, and wrathful words make them wrathful. Kind words also produce their own image on men's souls; and a beautiful image it is. They smooth, and quiet, and comfort the hearer.

Necessity, that great refuge and excuse for human frailty, breaks through all law; and he is not to be accounted in fault whose crime is not the effect of choice, but force.

To go beyond the bounds of moderation is to outrage humanity. The greatness of the human soul is shown by knowing how to keep within proper bounds. There are two equally dangerous extremes- to shut reason out, and not to let nothing in.

Do you wish people to think well of you? Don't speak well of yourself.

I bring you the gift of these four words: I believe in you.

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.