Blaise Pascal Quotes

420 Sourced Quotes

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
All the dignity of man consists in thought. Thought is therefore by its nature a wonderful and incomparable thing. It must have strange defects to be contemptible. But it has such, so that nothing is more ridiculous. How great it is in its nature! How vile it is in its defects! But what is this thought? How foolish it is!

Blaise Pascal
Piety is different from superstition. To carry piety to the extent of superstition is to destroy it. The heretics reproach us with this superstitious submission. It is doing what they reproach us with.

Blaise Pascal
If a man loves a woman for her beauty, does he love her? No; for the smallpox, which destroys her beauty without killing her, causes his love to cease. And if any one loves me for my judgment or my memory, does he really love me? No; for I can lose these qualities without ceasing to be.

Blaise Pascal
Is it courage in a dying man to go, in weakness and in agony, to affront an almighty and eternal God?

Blaise Pascal
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
Some vices only lay hold of us by means of others, and these, like branches, fall on removal of the trunk.

Blaise Pascal
Faith affirms many things, respecting which the senses are silent, but nothing that they deny. It is superior, but never opposed to their testimony

Blaise Pascal
One-half of life is admitted by us to be passed in sleep, in which, however, it may appear otherwise, we have no perception of truth, and all our feelings are delusions; who knows but the other half of life, in which we think we are awake, is a sleep also, but in some respects different from the other, and from which we wake when we, as we call it, sleep. As a man dreams often that he is dreaming, crowding one dreamy delusion on another.

Blaise Pascal
It is not only old and early impressions that deceive us; the charms of novelty have the same power.

Blaise Pascal
The sweetness of glory is so great that, join it to what we will, even to death, we love it.

Blaise Pascal
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
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.

Blaise Pascal
How comes it that a cripple does not offend us, but a fool does? Because a cripple recognizes that we walk straight, whereas a fool declares that it is we who are silly; if it were not so, we should feel pity and not anger.

Blaise Pascal
Education produces natural intuitions, and natural intuitions are erased by education.

Blaise Pascal
The Church limits her sacramental services to the faithful. Christ gave Himself upon the cross a ransom for all.

Blaise Pascal
Flies are so mighty that they win battles, paralyse our minds, eat up our bodies.

Blaise Pascal
The weakness of human reason appears more evidently in those who know it not than in those who know it.

Blaise Pascal
There was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present.

Blaise Pascal
Reflect on death as in Jesus Christ, not as without Jesus Christ. Without Jesus Christ it is dreadful, it is alarming, it is the terror of nature. In Jesus Christ it is fair and lovely, it is good and holy, it is the joy of saints.

Blaise Pascal
The imagination enlarges little objects so as to fill our souls with a fantastic estimate; and, with rash insolence, it belittles the great to its own measure, as when talking of God.

Blaise Pascal
Do they think that they have given us great pleasure by telling us that they hold our soul to be no more than wind or smoke, and saying it moreover in tones of pride and satisfaction? Is this then something to be said gaily? Is it not on the contrary something to be said sadly, as being the saddest thing in the world?

Blaise Pascal
Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is
the consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being.

Blaise Pascal
Opinion is, as it were, the queen of the world, but force is its tyrant.

Blaise Pascal
The mind naturally makes progress, and the will naturally clings to objects; so that for want of right objects, it will attach itself to wrong ones.

Blaise Pascal
All mathematicians would... be intuitive if they had clear sight, for they do not reason incorrectly from principles known to them; and intuitive minds would be mathematical if they could turn their eyes to the principles of mathematics to which they are unused.

Blaise Pascal
Let us imagine a number of men in chains and all condemned to death, where some are killed each day in the sight of the others, and those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows and wait their turn, looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope. It is an image of the condition of man.

Blaise Pascal
Law was once introduced without reason, and has become reasonable.

Blaise Pascal
Notwithstanding the sight of all our miseries, which press upon us and take us by the throat, we have an instinct which we cannot repress, and which lifts us up.

Blaise Pascal
Sneezing absorbs all the functions of the soul just as much as the [sexual] act, but we do not draw from it the same conclusions against the greatness of man, because it is involuntary; although we bring it about, we do so involuntarily. It is not for the sake of the thing in itself but for another end, and is therefore not a sign of man's weakness, or his subjection to this act.

Blaise Pascal