Pascal Quotes
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.
Concupiscence and force are the source of all our actions; concupiscence causes voluntary actions, force involuntary ones.
That we must love one God only is a thing so evident that it does not require miracles to prove it.
The art of revolutionizing and overturning states is to undermine established customs, by going back to their origin, in order to mark their want of justice.
Is it courage in a dying man to go, in weakness and in agony, to affront an almighty and eternal God?
Justice and truth are two such subtle points, that our tools are too blunt to touch them accurately.
Death is easier to bear without thinking of it, than the thought of death without peril.
The serene, silent beauty of a holy life is the most powerful influence in the world, next to the night of God.
All men have happiness as their object: there is no exception. However different the means they employ, they all aim at the same end.
Console-toi, tu ne me chercherais pas si tu ne m'avais trouve . Comfort yourself.You would not seek me if you had not found me.
The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.
Nothing is good but mediocrity. The majority has settled that, and finds fault with him who escapes it at whichever end... To leave the mean is to abandon humanity.
Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them.
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.
We are all given a gift of existence and of being sentient beings, and I think true happiness lies in love and compassion.
Nothing fortifies scepticism more than that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.
By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.
Death itself is less painful when it comes upon us unawares than the bare contemplation of it, even when danger is far distant.
Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.
Amusement allures and deceives us and leads us down imperceptibly in thoughtlessness to the grave
How vain painting is, exciting admiration by its resemblance to things of which we do not admire the originals.
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.
The sweetness of glory is so great that, join it to what we will, even to death, we love it.
Those who write against vanity want the glory of having written well, and their readers the glory of reading well, and I who write this have the same desire, as perhaps those who read this have also.
There should be in eloquence that which is pleasing and that which is real; but that which is pleasing should itself be real.
Extremes are for us as if they were not, and as if we were not in regard to them; they escape from us, or we from them.
The consciousness of the falsity of present pleasures, and the ignorance of the vanity of absent pleasures, cause inconstancy.
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.
Put the world's greatest philosopher on a plank that is wider than need be; if there is a precipe below, although his reason may convince him that he is safe, his imagination will prevail.
We never do evil so effectually as when we are led to do it by a false principle of conscience.
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.
We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.