Blaise Pascal - Pensées

133 Sourced Quotes

View all Blaise Pascal Quotes
It is as impossible to know the parts without knowing the whole as to know the whole without knowing the particular parts.

Blaise Pascal
There is a lot of difference between tempting and leading into error. God tempts but does not lead into error. To tempt is to provide opportunities for us to do certain things if we do not love God, but putting us under no necessity to do so. To lead into error is to compel a man necessarily to conclude and follow a falsehood.

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
Dull minds are never either intuitive or mathematical.

Blaise Pascal
It is superstitious to put one's hopes in formalities, but arrogant to refuse to submit to them.

Blaise Pascal
All men naturally hate each other. We have used concupiscence as best we can to make it serve the common good, but this is mere sham and a false image of charity, for essentially it is just hate.

Blaise Pascal
The art of subversion, of revolution, is to dislodge established customs by probing down to their origins in order to show how they lack authority and justice.

Blaise Pascal
Probability — Each one can employ it; no one can take it away.

Blaise Pascal
It is not possible to have reasonable grounds for not believing in miracles.

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
That something so obvious as the vanity of the world should be so little recognized that people find it odd and surprising to be told that it is foolish to seek greatness; that is most remarkable.

Blaise Pascal
Flies are so mighty that they win battles, paralyse our minds, eat up our bodies.

Blaise Pascal
Do they think that they have given us great pleasure by telling us that they hold our soul to be no more than wind or smoke, and saying it moreover in tones of pride and satisfaction? Is this then something to be said gaily? Is it not on the contrary something to be said sadly, as being the saddest thing in the world?

Blaise Pascal