Blaise Pascal Quotes

420 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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
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