Blaise Pascal Quotes

420 Sourced Quotes

It is right that what is just should be obeyed. It is necessary that what is strongest should be obeyed.

Blaise Pascal
God only pours out his light into the mind after having subdued the rebellion of the will by an altogether heavenly gentleness which charms and wins it.

Blaise Pascal
All men are almost led to believe not of proof, but by attraction. This way is base, ignoble, and irrelevant; every one therefore disavows it. Each one professes to believe and even to love nothing but what he knows to be worthy of belief and love.

Blaise Pascal
I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

Blaise Pascal
The whole title by which you possess your property, is not a title of nature but of a human institution.

Blaise Pascal
No man ever believes with a true and saving faith unless God inclines his heart; and no man when God does incline his heart can refrain from believing.

Blaise Pascal
The best books are those, which those who read them believe they themselves could have written.

Blaise Pascal
All the misfortunes of men derive from one single thing, which is their inability to be at ease in a room.

Blaise Pascal
When we see an effect happen always in the same manner, we infer that it takes place by a natural necessity; as, for instance, that the sun will rise to morrow; but nature often deceives us, and will not submit to its own rules.

Blaise Pascal
If our condition were truly happy we should not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it.

Blaise Pascal
We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.

Blaise Pascal
Civil wars are the greatest of evils. They are inevitable, if we wish to reward merit, for all will say that they are meritorious.

Blaise Pascal
The present is never the mark of our designs. We use both past and present as our means and instruments, but the future only as our object and aim.

Blaise Pascal
Seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied.

Blaise Pascal
We think very little of time present; we anticipate the future, as being too slow, and with a view to hasten it onward, we recall the past to stay it as too swiftly gone. We are so thoughtless, that we thus wander through the hours which are not here, regardless only of the moment that is actually our own.

Blaise Pascal
All the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.

Blaise Pascal
We do not weary of eating and sleeping every day, for hunger and sleepiness recur. Without that we should weary of them. So, without the hunger for spiritual things, we weary of them. Hunger after righteousness--the eighth beatitude.

Blaise Pascal
For it is to judgment that perception belongs, as science belongs to intellect. Intuition is the part of judgment, mathematics of intellect.

Blaise Pascal
We may have three main objects in the study of truth: first, to find it when we are seeking it; second, to demonstrate it after we have found it; third, to distinguish it from error by examining it.

Blaise Pascal
There is nothing that we can see on earth which does not either show the wretchedness of man or the mercy of God. One either sees the powerlessness of man without God, or the strength of man with God.

Blaise Pascal
That queen, of error, whom we call fancy and opinion, is the more deceitful because she does not always deceive. She would be the infallible rule of truth if she were the infallible rule of falsehood; but being only most frequently in error, she gives no evidence of her real quality, for she marks with the same character both that which is true and that which is false.

Blaise Pascal
Instead of complaining that God had hidden himself, you will give Him thanks for having revealed so much of Himself.

Blaise Pascal
Let no one say that I have said nothing new... the arrangement of the subject is new. When we play tennis, we both play with the same ball, but one of us places it better.

Blaise Pascal
But is it probable that probability gives assurance?

Blaise Pascal
There are vices which have no hold upon us, but in connection with others; and which, when you cut down the trunk, fall like the branches.

Blaise Pascal
Having been unable to strengthen justice, we have justified strength.

Blaise Pascal
We know then the existence and nature of the finite, because we also are finite and have extension. We know the existence of the infinite and are ignorant of its nature, because it has extension like us, but not limits like us. But we know neither the existence nor the nature of God, because he has neither extension nor limits.

Blaise Pascal
Jesus Christ came to tell men that they have no enemies but themselves.

Blaise Pascal
I have a hundred times wished that if a God maintains Nature, she should testify to Him unequivocally, and that, if the signs she gives are deceptive, she should suppress them altogether.

Blaise Pascal
We naturally believe ourselves far more capable of reaching the centre of things than of embracing their circumference. The visible extent of the world visibly exceeds us, but as we exceed little things, we think ourselves more capable of knowing them.

Blaise Pascal