Blaise Pascal Quotes

420 Sourced Quotes

Nature has placed us so well in the middle that if we change one side of the balance, we change the other also.

Blaise Pascal
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
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
The mind of the greatest man on earth is not so independent of circumstances as not to feel inconvenienced by the merest buzzing noise about him; it does not need the report of a cannon to disturb his thoughts. The creaking of a vane or a pully is quite enough. Do not wonder that he reasons ill just now; a fly is buzzing by his ear; it is quite enough to unfit him for giving good counsel.

Blaise Pascal
When malice has reason on its side, it looks forth bravely, and displays that reason in all its luster. When austerity and self-denial have not realized true happiness, and the soul returns to the dictates of nature, the reaction is fearfully extravagant.

Blaise Pascal
Because... you have believed from childhood that a box was empty when you saw nothing in it, you have believed in the possibility of a vacuum.

Blaise Pascal
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
If we dreamed the same thing every night, it would affect us much as the objects we see every day. And if a common workman were sure to dream every night for twelve hours that he was a king, I believe he would be almost as happy as a king who should dream every night for twelve hours on end that he was a common workman.

Blaise Pascal
The pagans do not know God, and love only the earth. The Jews know the true God, and love only the earth. The Christians know the true God, and do not love the earth.

Blaise Pascal
We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us from seeing it.

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

Blaise Pascal
Vanity is so anchored in the heart of man that a soldier, a soldier's servant, a cook, a porter brags and wishes to have his admirers. Even philosophers wish for them. Those who write against vanity want to have the glory of having written well; and those who read it desire the glory of having read it. I who write this have perhaps this desire, and perhaps those who will read it.

Blaise Pascal
Generally we are occupied either with the miseries which now we feel, or with those which threaten; and even when we see ourselves sufficiently secure from the approach of either, still fretfulness, though unwarranted by either present or expected affliction, fails not to spring up from the deep recesses of the heart, where its roots naturally grow, and to fill the soul with its poison.

Blaise Pascal
To find recreation in amusements is not happiness; for this joy springs from alien and extrinsic sources, and is therefore dependent upon and subject to interruption by a thousand accidents, which may minister inevitable affliction.

Blaise Pascal
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.

Blaise Pascal
There would be too great darkness, if truth had not visible signs.

Blaise Pascal
Nature has some perfections to show that she is the image of God, and some defects, to show that she is only His image.

Blaise Pascal
As we speak of poetical beauty, so ought we to speak of mathematical beauty and medical beauty. But we do not do so; and that reason is that we know well what is the object of mathematics, and that it consists in proofs, and what is the object of medicine, and that it consists in healing. But we do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry.

Blaise Pascal
We do not rest satisfied with the present.... So imprudent we are that we wander in the times which are not ours and do not thinkof the only one which belongs to us; and so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no more and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists. For the present is generally painful to us.

Blaise Pascal
Rivers are highways that move on and bear us whither we wish to go.

Blaise Pascal
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
The exterior must be joined to the interior to obtain anything from God, that is to say, we must kneel, pray with the lips, and soon, in order that proud man, who would not submit himself to God, may be now subject to the creature.

Blaise Pascal
The last thing one settles in writing a book is what one should put in first.

Blaise Pascal
The God of Christians is a God of love and comfort, a God who fills the soul and heart of those whom he possesses, a God who makes them conscious of their inward wretchedness, and his infinite mercy; who unites himself to their inmost soul, who fills it with humility and joy, with confidence and love, who renders them incapable of any other end than himself.

Blaise Pascal
I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he would have been quite willing to dispense with God. But he had to make Him give a fillip to set the world in motion; beyond this, he has no further need of God.

Blaise Pascal
Do not draw this conclusion from your experiment, that there remains nothing for you to know; but rather that there remains an infinity for you to know.

Blaise Pascal
Take away probability, and you can no longer please the world; give probability, and you can no longer displease it.

Blaise Pascal
Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things.

Blaise Pascal
Those whom we call ancient were really new in all things, and properly constituted the infancy of mankind.

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

Blaise Pascal