Blaise Pascal Quotes

420 Sourced Quotes

Meanings receive their dignity from words instead of giving it to them.

Blaise Pascal
What matters it that man should have a little more knowledge of the universe? If he has it, he gets little higher. Is he not always infinitely removed from the end, and is not the duration of our life equally removed from eternity, even if it lasts ten years longer?

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
True eloquence makes light of eloquence. True morality makes light of morality.

Blaise Pascal