Blaise Pascal - True Quotes

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Logic has borrowed, perhaps, the rules of geometry, without comprehending their force... it does not thence follow that they have entered into the spirit of geometry, and I should be greatly averse... to placing them on a level with that science that teaches the true method of directing reason.

Blaise Pascal
Let man reawake and consider what he is compared with the reality of things; regard himself lost in this remote corner of Nature; and from the tiny cell where he lodges, to wit the Universe, weigh at their true worth earth, kingdoms, towns, himself. What is a man face to face with infinity?

Blaise Pascal
True eloquence makes light of eloquence. True morality makes light of morality.

Blaise Pascal
That a religion may be true, it must have knowledge of our nature.

Blaise Pascal
When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true.

Blaise Pascal
Eloquence; it requires the pleasant and the real; but the pleasant must itself be drawn from the true.

Blaise Pascal
Man is so great that his greatness appears even in the consciousness of his misery. A tree does not know itself to be miserable. It is true that it is misery indeed to know one's self to be miserable; but then it is greatness also. In this way, all man's miseries go to prove his greatness. They are the miseries of a mighty potentate, of a dethroned monarch.

Blaise Pascal
The Stoics say, "Retire within yourselves; it is there you will find your rest." And that is not true. Others say, "Go out of yourselves; seek happiness in amusement." And this is not true. Illness comes. Happiness is neither without us nor within us. It is in God, both without us and within us.

Blaise Pascal
According to the doctrine of chance, you ought to put yourself to the trouble of searching for the truth; for if you die without worshiping the True Cause, you are lost. "But," say you, "if He had wished me to worship Him, He would have left me signs of His will." He has done so; but you neglect them. Seek them, therefore; it is well worth 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 would have far more fear of being mistaken, and of finding that the Christian religion was true, than of not being mistaken in believing it true.

Blaise Pascal
The pagans do not know God, and love only the earth. The Jews know the true God, and love only the earth. The Christians know the true God, and do not love the earth.

Blaise Pascal
There was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present.

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
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
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
True eloquence takes no heed of eloquence, true morality takes no heed of morality.

Blaise Pascal
Thus he had a double thought: the one by which he acted as king, the other by which he recognized his true state, and that it was accident alone that had placed him in his present condition.

Blaise Pascal
Several particular maxims... are as powerful, although false, in carrying away belief, as those the most true.

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
It is a funny sort of justice whose limits are marked by a river; true on this side of the Pyrenees, false on the other.

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
To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

Blaise Pascal
As to the objection that these rules are common in the world, that it is necessary to define every thing and to prove every thing, and that logicians themselves have placed them among their art, I would that the thing were true and that it were so well known... But so little is this the case, that, geometricians alone excepted, who are so few in number that they are a single in a whole nation and long periods of time, we see no others that know it.

Blaise Pascal
The method of not erring is sought by all the world. The logicians profess to guide it, the geometricians alone attain it, and apart from science, and the imitations of it, there are no true demonstrations.

Blaise Pascal
Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.

Blaise Pascal
These two states which it is necessary to know together in order to see the whole truth, being known separately, lead necessarily to one of these two vices, pride or indolence, in which all men are invariably led before grace, since if they do not remain in their disorders through laxity, they forsake them through vanity, so true is that which you have just repeated to me from St. Augustine, and which I find to a great extent; for in fact homage is rendered to them in many ways.

Blaise Pascal
It is good to be tired and wearied by the futile search after the true good, that we may stretch out our arms to the Redeemer.

Blaise Pascal
If magistrates had true justice, and if physicians had the true art of healing, they would have no occasion for square caps; the majesty of these sciences would itself be venerable enough.

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