Top 100 Blaise Pascal Quotes
#1. 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.
Blaise Pascal
#2. That something so obvious as the vanity of the world should be so little recognized that people find it odd and surprising to be told that it is foolish to seek greatness; that is most remarkable.
Blaise Pascal
#3. We 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 Pascal
#4. There is nothing that we can see on earth which does not either show the wretchedness of man or the mercy of God. One either sees the powerlessness of man without God, or the strength of man with God.
Blaise Pascal
#5. The weakness of human reason appears more evidently in those who know it not than in those who know it.
Blaise Pascal
#6. 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.
Blaise Pascal
#7. Our senses will not admit anything extreme. Too much noise confuses us, too much light dazzles us, too great distance or nearness prevents vision, too great prolixity or brevity weakens an argument, too much pleasure gives pain, too much accordance annoys.
Blaise Pascal
#8. There are plenty of maxims in the world; all that remains is to apply them.
Blaise Pascal
#9. 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.
Blaise Pascal
#10. It is not possible to have reasonable grounds for not believing in miracles.
Blaise Pascal
#12. 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.
Blaise Pascal
#13. 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.
Blaise Pascal
#14. Cleopatra's nose, had it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed.
Blaise Pascal
#15. That we must love one God only is a thing so evident that it does not require miracles to prove it.
Blaise Pascal
#16. Each one is all in all to himself; for being dead, all is dead to him.
Blaise Pascal
#17. If we regulate our conduct according to our own convictions, we may safely disregard the praise or censure of others.
Blaise Pascal
#18. (Man,) the glory and the scandal of the universe.
Blaise Pascal
#19. The state of man is inconstancy, ennui, anxiety.
Blaise Pascal
#20. [On vanity:] The nose of Cleopatra: if it had been shorter, the face of the earth would have changed.
Blaise Pascal
#21. Love has no age as it is always renewing itself.
Blaise Pascal
#22. Those honor nature well, who teach that she can speak on everything.
Blaise Pascal
#23. What a strange vanity painting is; it attracts admiration by resembling the original, we do not admire.
Blaise Pascal
#24. Man is neither angel nor beast, and it is unfortunately the case that anyone trying to act the angel acts the beast.
Blaise Pascal
#25. Do not be astonished to see simple people believing without argument. God makes them love him and hate themselves. He inclines their hearts to believe. We shall never believe, with an effective belief and faith, unless God inclines our hearts.
Blaise Pascal
#26. Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars. I will not forget thy word. Amen.
Blaise Pascal
#28. People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered themselves than by those found by others.
Blaise Pascal
#29. 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.
Blaise Pascal
#30. Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.
Blaise Pascal
#31. If there were only one religion, God would indeed be manifest.
Blaise Pascal
#32. All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit quiet in a room alone.
Blaise Pascal
#33. Good deeds, when concealed, are the most admirable.
Blaise Pascal
#34. The Fall is an offense to human reason, but once accepted, it makes perfect sense of the human condition.
Blaise Pascal
#35. If you want to be a real seeker of truth, you need to, at least once in your lifetime, doubt in, as much as it's possible, in everything.
Blaise Pascal
#36. Men seek rest in a struggle against difficulties; and when they have conquered these, rest becomes insufferable.
Blaise Pascal
#37. One-half of the ills of life come because men are unwilling to sit down quietly for thirty minutes to think through all the possible consequences of their acts.
Blaise Pascal
#38. Equality of possessions is no doubt right, but, as men could not make might obey right, they have made right obey might.
Blaise Pascal
#39. We can only know God well when we know our own sin. And those who have known God without knowing their wretchedness have not glorified Him but have glorified themselves.
Blaise Pascal
#40. Rivers are roads that move and carry us whither we wish to go.
[Fr., Les rivieres sont des chemins qui marchant et qui portent ou l'on veut aller.]
Blaise Pascal
#41. Without Jesus Christ man must be in vice and misery with Jesus Christ man is free from vice and misery in Him is all our virtue and all our happiness. Apart from Him there is but vice, misery, darkness, death, despair.
Blaise Pascal
#42. It is not permitted to the most equitable of men to be a judge in his own cause.
Blaise Pascal
#43. Habit is the second nature which destroys the first.
Blaise Pascal
#44. 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.
Blaise Pascal
#45. Through space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; through thought I comprehend the world.
Blaise Pascal
#46. It is the conduct of God, who disposes all things kindly, to put religion into the mind by reason, and into the heart by grace.
Blaise Pascal
#47. A little thing comforts us because a little thing afflicts us.
Blaise Pascal
#48. The past and present are only our means; the future is always our end. Thus we never really live, but only hope to live.
Blaise Pascal
#49. Finally, let them recognise that 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.
Blaise Pascal
#50. 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.
Blaise Pascal
#52. Pride 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 Pascal
#53. What a chimera then is man. What a novelty! What a monster ... what a contradiction, what a prodigy
Blaise Pascal
#54. Our notion of symmetry is derived form the human face. Hence, we demand symmetry horizontally and in breadth only, not vertically nor in depth.
Blaise Pascal
#55. God is or He is not. But to which side shall we incline? Let us weigh the gain and the lose in wagering that God is. Let us estimate the two changes. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, lose nothing. Wager then without any hesitation that He is
Blaise Pascal
#56. That which makes us go so far for love is that we never think that we might have need of anything besides that which we love.
Blaise Pascal
#57. Pride counterbalances all these miseries; man either hides or displays them, and glories in his awareness of them.
Blaise Pascal
#58. If god does not exist, one loses nothing by believing in him anyway, while if he does exist, one stands to lose everything by not believing.
Blaise Pascal
#59. Kind words produce their own image in men's souls; and a beautiful image it is. They soothe and quiet and comfort the hearer. They shame him out of his sour, morose, unkind feelings. We have not yet begun to use kind words in such abundance as they ought to be used.
Blaise Pascal
#60. Earthly things must be known to be loved; heavenly things must be loved to be known.
Blaise Pascal
#61. At the far end of this infinite distance a coin is being spun which will come down heads or tails. How will you wager? Reason cannot make you choose either, reason cannot prove either wrong.
Blaise Pascal
#62. Two things control men's nature, instinct and experience.
Blaise Pascal
#63. You would not seek me if you did not possess me.
Blaise Pascal
#64. Christianity is strange: it requires human beings to recognize that they are vile and even abominable.
Blaise Pascal
#65. The last advance of reason is to recognize that it is surpassed by innumerable things; it is feeble if it cannot realize that.
Blaise Pascal
#66. 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.
Blaise Pascal
#67. If magistrates had true justice, and if physicians had the true art of healing, they would have no occasion for square caps; the majesty of these sciences would itself be venerable enough.
Blaise Pascal
#68. 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.
Blaise Pascal
#69. The entire ocean is affected by a single pebble.
Blaise Pascal
#70. Without [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 Pascal
#71. Nothing is so defective as those laws which correct defects.
Blaise Pascal
#72. I bring you the gift of these four words: I believe in you.
Blaise Pascal
#73. The world is satisfied with words, few care to dive beneath the surface.
Blaise Pascal
#74. The end point of rationality is to demonstrate the limits of rationality.
Blaise Pascal
#75. Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.
Blaise Pascal
#76. What part of us feels pleasure? Is it our hand, our arm, our flesh, or our blood? It must obviously be something immaterial.
Blaise Pascal
#77. 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.
Blaise Pascal
#79. 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.
Blaise Pascal
#80. Who dispenses reputation? Who makes us respect and revere persons, works, laws, the great? Who but this faculty of imagination? All the riches of the earth are inadequate without its approval.
Blaise Pascal
#81. We feel neither extreme heat nor extreme cold; qualities that are in excess are so much at variance with our feelings that they are impalpable: we do not feel them, though we suffer from their effects.
Blaise Pascal
#82. The infinite distance between the mind & the body is a symbol of the distance that is infinitely more, between the intellect & love, for love is divine.
Blaise Pascal
#83. If a man is not made for God, why is he happy only in God?
Blaise Pascal
#84. I would inquire of reasonable persons whether this principle: Matter is naturally wholly incapable of thought, and this other: I think, therefore I am, are in fact the same in the mind of
Descartes, and in that of St. Augustine, who said the same thing twelve hundred years before.
Blaise Pascal
#85. No one is offended at not seeing everything; but one does not like to be mistaken, and that perhaps arises from the fact that man naturally cannot see everything, and that naturally he cannot err in the side he looks at, since the perceptions of our senses are always true.
Blaise Pascal
#86. I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.
Blaise Pascal
#87. God only pours out his light into the mind after having subdued the rebellion of the will by an altogether heavenly gentleness which charms and wins it.
Blaise Pascal
#88. We never do evil so effectually as when we are led to do it by a false principle of conscience.
Blaise Pascal
#89. Who confers reputation? who gives respect and veneration to persons, to books, to great men? Who but Opinion? How utterly insufficient are all the riches of the world without her approbation!
Blaise Pascal
#91. [Christianity] endeavors equally to establish these two things: that God has set up in the Church visible signs to make himself known to those who should seek him sincerely, and that he has nevertheless so disguised them that he will only be perceived by those who seek him with all their heart.
Blaise Pascal
#92. We are never in search of things, but always in search of the search.
Blaise Pascal
#93. They prefer death to peace, others prefer death to war.
Any opinion can be preferred to life, which it seems so natural to love dearly.
Blaise Pascal
#95. There is enough light for those who desire only to see, and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition.
Blaise Pascal
#96. Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.
Blaise Pascal
#97. Let man reawake and consider what he is compared with the reality of things; regard himself lost in this remote corner of Nature; and from the tiny cell where he lodges, to wit the Universe, weigh at their true worth earth, kingdoms, towns, himself. What is a man face to face with infinity?
Blaise Pascal
#98. However vast a man's spiritual resources, he is capable of but one great passion.
Blaise Pascal
#99. 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.
Blaise Pascal
#100. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature.
Blaise Pascal
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