Blaise Pascal Quotes

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How few friendships would be lasting if we knew what our best friends say of us in our absence.

Blaise Pascal
If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

Blaise Pascal
There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.

Blaise Pascal
If, being duke and peer, you would not be contented with my standing uncovered before you, but should also wish that I should esteem you, I should ask you to show me the qualities that merit my esteem. If you did this, you would gain it, and I could not refuse it to you with justice; but if you did not do it, you would be unjust to demand it of me; and assuredly you would not succeed, were you the greatest prince in the world.

Blaise Pascal
We never live, but we hope to live; and as we are always arranging to be happy, it must be that we never are so.

Blaise Pascal
The manner in which Epictetus, Montaigne, and Salomon de Tultie wrote, is the most usual, the most suggestive, the most remembered, and the oftener quoted; because it is entirely composed of thoughts born from the common talk of life.

Blaise Pascal
No one is ignorant that there are two avenues by which opinions are received into the soul, which are its two principal powers: the understanding and the will.

Blaise Pascal
The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

Blaise Pascal
One of the principal reasons that diverts those who are entering upon this knowledge so much from the true path which they should follow, is the fancy that they take at the outset that good things are inaccessible, giving them the name great, lofty, elevated, sublime. This destroys everything. I would call them low, common, familiar: these names suit it better; I hate such inflated expressions.

Blaise Pascal
God is surrounded with people full of love who demand of him the benefits of love which are in his power: thus he is properly the king of love.

Blaise Pascal
Things have different qualities, and the soul different inclinations; for nothing is simple which is presented to the soul, and the soul never presents itself simply to any object. Hence it comes that we weep and laugh at the same thing.

Blaise Pascal
A few rules include all that is necessary for the perfection of the definitions, the axioms, and the demonstrations, and consequently of the entire method of the geometrical proofs of the art of persuading.

Blaise Pascal
To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize.

Blaise Pascal
It is not shameful for man to succumb under pain, and it is shameful for him to succumb under pleasure.

Blaise Pascal
Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

Blaise Pascal
For after all, what is man in nature? A nothing in respect of that which is infinite, an all in respect of nothing, a middle betwixt nothing and all.

Blaise Pascal
A pious man said: "If I ignored the existence of God, I would adore the sun and women."

Blaise Pascal
Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

Blaise Pascal
The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first.

Blaise Pascal
There are hardly any truths upon which we always remain agreed, and still fewer objects of pleasure which we do not change every hour, I do not know whether there is a means of giving fixed rules for adapting discourse to the inconstancy of our caprices.

Blaise Pascal
Several particular maxims... are as powerful, although false, in carrying away belief, as those the most true.

Blaise Pascal
All the excesses, all the violence, and all the vanity of great men, come from the fact that they know not what they are: it being difficult for those who regard themselves at heart as equal with all men... For this it is necessary for one to forget himself, and to believe that he has some real excellence above them, in which consists this illusion that I am endeavoring to discover to you.

Blaise Pascal
You are in the same manner surrounded with a small circle of persons... full of desire. They demand of you the benefits of desire... You are therefore properly the king of desire.... equal in this to the greatest kings of the earth... It is desire that constitutes their power; that is, the possession of things that men covet.

Blaise Pascal
If the public thought elevates you above the generality of men, let the other humble you, and hold you in a perfect equality with all mankind, for this is your natural condition.

Blaise Pascal
What amazes me the most is to see that everyone is not amazed at his own weakness.

Blaise Pascal
Little things console us, because little things afflict us.

Blaise Pascal
How vain painting is, exciting admiration by its resemblance to things of which we do not admire the originals.

Blaise Pascal
Thus he had a double thought: the one by which he acted as king, the other by which he recognized his true state, and that it was accident alone that had placed him in his present condition.

Blaise Pascal
I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.

Blaise Pascal
Logic has borrowed, perhaps, the rules of geometry, without comprehending their force... it does not thence follow that they have entered into the spirit of geometry, and I should be greatly averse... to placing them on a level with that science that teaches the true method of directing reason.

Blaise Pascal