Blaise Pascal - Man Quotes

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Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair.

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
I have often said that man's unhappiness springs from one thing alone, his incapacity to stay quietly in one room.

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
To make a man a saint, it must indeed be by grace; and whoever doubts this does not know what a saint is, or a man.

Blaise Pascal
Each man is everything to himself, for with his death everything is dead for him. That is why each of us thinks he is everything to everyone. We must not judge nature by ourselves, but by its own standards.

Blaise Pascal
There are some men who expose themselves to damnation so foolishly by avarice, by brutality, by debauches, by violence, by excesses, by blasphemies!... it is always a great folly for a man to expose himself to damnation... He must despise desire and its kingdom, and aspire to that kingdom of love in which all the subjects breathe nothing but love, and desire nothing but the benefits of love.

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
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
Man is obviously made for thinking. Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought.

Blaise Pascal
The greatest satisfaction a woman can feel is to know that a man whom many other women love loves her alone.

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
Man is nothing but insincerity, falsehood, and hypocrisy. He does not like to hear the truth, and he shuns telling it.

Blaise Pascal
If we do not know ourselves to be full of pride, ambition, lust, weakness, misery, and injustice, we are indeed blind. And if, knowing this, we do not desire deliverance, what can we say of a man...?

Blaise Pascal
All who say the same things do not possess them in the same manner; and hence the incomparable author of the Art of Conversation pauses with so much care to make it understood that we must not judge of the capacity of a man by the excellence of a happy remark that we heard him make.... let us penetrate, says he, the mind from which it proceeds... it will oftenest be seen that he will be made to disavow it on the spot, and will be drawn very far from this better thought in which he does not believe, to plunge himself into another, quite base and ridiculous.

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
It is dangerous to explain too clearly to man how like he is to the animals without pointing out his greatness. It is also dangerous to make too much of his greatness without his vileness. It is still more dangerous to leave him in ignorance of both, but it is most valuable to represent both to him. Man must not be allowed to believe that he is equal either to animals or to angels, nor to be unaware of either, but he must know both.

Blaise Pascal
I condemn equally those who choose to praise man, those who choose to condemn him and those who choose to divert themselves, and I can only approve of those who seek with groans.

Blaise Pascal
For as old age is that period of life most remote from infancy, who does not see that old age in this universal man ought not to be sought in the times nearest his birth, but in those most remote from it?

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

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

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
I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

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
I cannot imagine a man without thought; he would be a stone or an animal.

Blaise Pascal
Man is so made that if he is told often enough that he is a fool he believes it.

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