Blaise Pascal Quotes

420 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
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
Dull minds are never either intuitive or mathematical.

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

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

Blaise Pascal
Let man consider what he is in comparison with all existence; let him regard himself as lost in this remote corner of nature; and from the little cell in which he finds himself lodged, I mean the universe, let him estimate at their true value the earth, kingdoms, cities, and himself. What is a man in the Infinite?

Blaise Pascal
It is an appalling thing to feel all one possesses drain away.

Blaise Pascal
When everyone is moving towards depravity, no one seems to be moving, but if someone stops he shows up the others who are rushing on, by acting as a fixed point.

Blaise Pascal
We desire truth, and find within ourselves only uncertainty. We seek happiness, and find only misery and death. We cannot but desire truth and happiness, and are incapable of certainty or happiness.

Blaise Pascal
The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.

Blaise Pascal
Eloquence is a painting of thought; and thus those who, after having painted it, add something more, make a picture instead of a portrait.

Blaise Pascal
Pride counterbalances all our miseries, for it either hides them, or, if it discloses them, boasts of that disclosure. Pride has such a thorough possession of us, even in the midst of our miseries and faults, that we are prepared to sacrifice life with joy, if it may but be talked of.

Blaise Pascal
I would have far more fear of being mistaken, and of finding that the Christian religion was true, than of not being mistaken in believing it true.

Blaise Pascal
The spaces of the universe enfold me and swallow me up like a speck; but I, by the power of thought, may comprehend the universe.

Blaise Pascal
Plurality which is not reduced to unity is confusion; unity which does not depend on plurality is tyranny.

Blaise Pascal
Christianity is strange. It bids man recognise that he is vile, even abominable, and bids him desire to be like God. Without such a counterpoise, this dignity would make him horribly vain, or this humiliation would make him terribly abject.

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

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

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
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