Blaise Pascal - Reason Quotes

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We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart. It is through the latter that we know first principles, and reason, which has nothing to do with it, tries in vain to refute them.

Blaise Pascal
The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.

Blaise Pascal
Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

Blaise Pascal
It is your own assent to yourself, and the constant voice of your own reason, and not of others, that should make you believe.

Blaise Pascal
Our reason is always disappointed by the inconsistency of appearances.

Blaise Pascal
Put the world's greatest philosopher on a plank that is wider than need be; if there is a precipice below, although his reason may convince him that he is safe, his imagination will prevail.

Blaise Pascal
Of the truths within our reach... the mind and the heart are as doors by which they are received into the soul, but... few enter by the mind, whilst they are brought in crowds by the rash caprices of the will, without the council of reason.

Blaise Pascal
We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.

Blaise Pascal
All mathematicians would... be intuitive if they had clear sight, for they do not reason incorrectly from principles known to them; and intuitive minds would be mathematical if they could turn their eyes to the principles of mathematics to which they are unused.

Blaise Pascal
Law was once introduced without reason, and has become reasonable.

Blaise Pascal
If we submit everything to reason our religion will be left with nothing mysterious or supernatural. If we offend the principles of reason our religion will be absurd and ridiculous.... There are two equally dangerous extremes: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason.

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
Mankind suffers from two excesses: to exclude reason, and to live by nothing but reason.

Blaise Pascal
Custom creates the whole of equity, for the simple reason that it is accepted.

Blaise Pascal
As we speak of poetical beauty, so ought we to speak of mathematical beauty and medical beauty. But we do not do so; and that reason is that we know well what is the object of mathematics, and that it consists in proofs, and what is the object of medicine, and that it consists in healing. But we do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry.

Blaise Pascal
People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come in to the mind of others.

Blaise Pascal
We are generally more effectually persuaded by reasons we have ourselves discovered than by those which have occurred to others.

Blaise Pascal
The art of persuasion consists as much in that of pleasing as in that of convincing, so much more are men governed by caprice than by reason!

Blaise Pascal
"God is, or He is not." But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager?... If you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.

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
Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness... and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him.

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

Blaise Pascal
In reading this author [Montaigne] and comparing him with Epictetus, I have found that they are assuredly the two greatest defenders of the two most celebrated sects of the world, and the only ones conformable to reason, since we can only follow one of these two roads, namely: either that there is a God, and then we place in him the sovereign good; or that he is uncertain, and that then the true good is also uncertain, since he is incapable of it.

Blaise Pascal
Imagination cannot make fools wise, but it makes them happy, as against reason, which only makes its friends wretched: one covers them with glory, the other with shame.

Blaise Pascal
When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the small space which I fill, or even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified, and wonder that I am here rather than there, for there is no reason why here rather than there, or now rather than then. Who has set me here? By whose order and design have this place and time been destined for me?—Memoria hospitis unius diei prætereuntis.
It is not well to be too much at liberty. It is not well to have all we want.
How many kingdoms know nothing of us!
The eternal silence of these infinite spaces alarms me.

Blaise Pascal