Blaise Pascal Quotes
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Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.
[Action]
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Our own interests are still an exquisite means for dazzling our eyes agreeably.
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Our senses will not admit anything extreme. Too much noise confuses us, too much light dazzles us, too great distance or nearness prevents vision, too great prolixity or brevity weakens an argument, too much pleasure gives pain, too much accordance annoys.
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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.
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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.
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People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered themselves than by those found by others.
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Perfect clarity would profit the intellect but damage the will.
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Piety is different from superstition. To carry piety to the extent of superstition is to destroy it. The heretics reproach us with this superstitious submission. It is doing what they reproach us with.
[Piety]
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Power is the queen of the world, not opinion; but opinion makes use of power.
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Pride counterbalances all our miseries, for it either hides them, or, if it discloses them, boasts of that disclosure. Pride has such a thorough possession of us, even in the midst of our miseries and faults, that we are prepared to sacrifice life with joy, if it may but be talked of.
[Pride]
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Reason commands us far more imperiously than a master; for in disobeying the one we are unfortunate, and in disobeying the other we are fools.
[Reason]
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Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it.
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Reflect on death as in Jesus Christ, not as without Jesus Christ. Without Jesus Christ it is dreadful, it is alarming, it is the terror of nature. In Jesus Christ it is fair and lovely, it is good and holy, it is the joy of saints.
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Rivers are roads that move and carry us whither we wish to go.
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Should a man happen to err in supposing the Christian religion to be true, he could not be a loser by the mistake. But how irreparable is his loss, and how inexpressible his danger, who should err in supposing it to be false.
[Religion]
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Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.
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Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.
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St. Augustine teaches us that there is in each man a Serpent, an Eve, and an Adam. Our senses and natural propensities are the Serpent; the excitable desire is the Eve; and reason is the Adam. Our nature tempts us perpetually; criminal desire is often excited; but sin is not completed till reason consents.
[Temptation]
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Symmetry is what we see at a glance.
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That dog is mine said those poor children; that place in the sun is mine; such is the beginning and type of usurpation throughout the earth.
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