Blaise Pascal - Natural Quotes

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This right which you have, is not founded any more than his upon any quality or any merit in yourself which renders you worthy of it. Your soul and your body are, of themselves, indifferent to the state of boatman or that of duke; and there is no natural bond that attaches them to one condition rather than to another.

Blaise Pascal
Education produces natural intuitions, and natural intuitions are erased by education.

Blaise Pascal
All great amusements are dangerous to the Christian life; but among all those which the world has invented there is none more to be feared than the theater. It is a representation of the passions so natural and so delicate that it excites them and gives birth to them in our hearts, and, above all, to that of love.

Blaise Pascal
Nature has made all her truths independent of one another. Our art makes one dependent on the other. But this is not natural. Each keeps its own place.

Blaise Pascal
Parents fear the destruction of natural affection in their children. What is this natural principle so liable to decay? Habit is a second nature, which destroys the first. Why is not custom nature? I suspect that this nature itself is but a first custom, as custom is a second nature.

Blaise Pascal
Let us now speak according to natural lights. If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible.... We are then incapable of knowing of either what He is or if He is....

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 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
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
It is not your strength and your natural power that subjects all these people to you. Do not pretend then to rule them by force or to treat them with harshness. Satisfy their reasonable desires; alleviate their necessities; let your pleasure consist in being beneficent; advance them as much as you can, and you will act like the true king of desire.

Blaise Pascal
It is natural for the mind to believe and for the will to love; so that, for want of true objects, they must attach themselves to false.

Blaise Pascal
Bless yourself with holy water, have Masses said, and so on; by a simple and natural process this will make you believe, and will dull you — will quiet your proudly critical intellect.

Blaise Pascal
Nothing is more common than good things: the point in question is only to discriminate them; and it is certain that they are all natural and within our reach and even known to all mankind.

Blaise Pascal
What would you say of that man who was made king by the error of the people, if he had so far forgotten his natural condition as to imagine that this kingdom was due to him, that he deserved it, and that it belonged to him of right? You would marvel at his stupidity and folly. But is there less in the people of rank who live in so strange a forgetfulness of their natural condition?

Blaise Pascal
When we see a natural style, we are quite surprised and delighted, for we expected to see an author and we find a man.

Blaise Pascal
I make no doubt... that these rules are simple, artless, and natural.

Blaise Pascal
There no doubt exist natural laws, but once this fine reason of ours was corrupted, it corrupted everything.

Blaise Pascal
When a natural discourse paints a passion or an effect, one feels within oneself the truth of what one reads, which was there before, although one did not know it. Hence one is inclined to love him who makes us feel it, for he has not shown us his own riches, but ours....such community of intellect that we have with him necessarily inclines the heart to love.

Blaise Pascal