Blaise Pascal Quotes

420 Sourced Quotes

A little thing comforts us because a little thing afflicts us.

Blaise Pascal
When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true.

Blaise Pascal
Nature has made all her truths independent of one another. Our art makes one dependent on the other. But this is not natural. Each keeps its own place.

Blaise Pascal
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
All great amusements are dangerous to the Christian life; but among all those which the world has invented there is none more to be feared than the theater. It is a representation of the passions so natural and so delicate that it excites them and gives birth to them in our hearts, and, above all, to that of love.

Blaise Pascal
You corrupt religion either in favour of your friends, or against your enemies.

Blaise Pascal
All I know is that I must soon die, but what I know least is this very death which I cannot escape.

Blaise Pascal
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.

Blaise Pascal
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.

Blaise Pascal
There is a certain standard of grace and beauty which consists in a certain relation between our nature, such as it is, weak or strong, and the thing which pleases us. Whatever is formed according to this standard pleases us, be it house, song, discourse, verse, prose, woman, birds, rivers, trees, room, dress, and so on. Whatever is not made according to this standard displeases those who have good taste.

Blaise Pascal
If man were happy, he would be the more so, the less he was diverted, like the saints and God.

Blaise Pascal
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
Dull minds are never either intuitive or mathematical.

Blaise Pascal
Let us, then, take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the infinite. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature.

Blaise Pascal
It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.

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

Blaise Pascal
Human life is thus only a perpetual illusion; men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does of us in our absence. Human society is founded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each knew what his friend said of him in his absence, although he then spoke in sincerity and without passion.

Blaise Pascal
It is superstitious to put one's hopes in formalities, but arrogant to refuse to submit to them.

Blaise Pascal
How shall one who is so weak in his childhood become really strong when he grows older? We only change our fancies.

Blaise Pascal
Religion is so great a thing that it is right that those who will not take the trouble to seek it if it be obscure, should be deprived of it.

Blaise Pascal
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.

Blaise Pascal
It is not in Montaigne, but in myself, that I find all that I see in him.

Blaise Pascal
The art of subversion, of revolution, is to dislodge established customs by probing down to their origins in order to show how they lack authority and justice.

Blaise Pascal
Not the zeal alone of those who seek Him proves God, but the blindness of those who seek Him not.

Blaise Pascal
The majority is the best way, because it is visible, and has strength to make itself obeyed. Yet it is the opinion of the least able.

Blaise Pascal
Probability — Each one can employ it; no one can take it away.

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

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

Blaise Pascal
All is one, all is different. How many natures exist in man? How many vocations? And by what chance does each man ordinarily choose what he has heard praised?

Blaise Pascal
True eloquence makes light of eloquence. True morality makes light of morality.

Blaise Pascal