Blaise Pascal - Man Quotes

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In proportion as our own mind is enlarged we discover a greater number of men of originality. Commonplace people see no difference between one man and another.

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
What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, an imbecile worm of the earth; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe.

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
Man is neither angel nor beast; and the misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the beast.

Blaise Pascal
A doubtful balance is made between truth and pleasure, and... the knowledge of one and the feeling of the other stir up a combat the success of which is very uncertain, since, in order to judge of it, it would be necessary to know all that passes in the innermost spirit of the man, of which man himself is scarcely ever conscious.

Blaise Pascal
Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he feels his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness.

Blaise Pascal
Let man then contemplate the whole of nature in her full and grand majesty... No idea approaches it. We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.

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
We have so exalted a notion of the human soul that we cannot bear to be despised, or even not to be esteemed by it. Man, in fact, places all his happiness in this esteem.

Blaise Pascal
Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him?

Blaise Pascal
The principles of pleasure are not firm and stable. They are different in all mankind, and variable in every particular with such a diversity that there is no man more different from another than from himself at different times.

Blaise Pascal
For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.

Blaise Pascal
Man is only a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.

Blaise Pascal
How hollow is the heart of man, and how full of excrement!

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
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
The state of man: inconstancy, boredom, anxiety.

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
In order to enter into a real knowledge of your condition, consider it in this image: A man was cast by a tempest upon an unknown island, the inhabitants of which were in trouble to find their king, who was lost; and having a strong resemblance both in form and face to this king, he was taken for him, and acknowledged in this capacity by all the people.

Blaise Pascal
These philosophers of the world place contrarieties in the same subject; for the one attributed greatness to nature and the other weakness to this same nature, which could not subsist; whilst faith teaches us to place them in different subjects: all that is infirm belonging to nature, all that is powerful belonging to grace. Such is the marvelous and novel union which God alone could teach, and which he alone could make, and which is only a type and an effect of the ineffable union of two natures in the single person of a Man-God.

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