Famous Quotes

Quotes by Blaise Pascal

• Men often take their imagination for their heart and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.
• Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.
• Noble deeds that are concealed are most esteemed.
• Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.
• Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without a passion, without business, without entertainment, without care.
• One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.
• Our nature consists in motion complete rest is death.
• 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.
• Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.
• That we must love one God only is a thing so evident that it does not require miracles to prove it.
• The charm of fame is so great that we like every object to which it is attached, even death.
• The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.
• The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.
• The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.
• The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.
• The immortality of the soul is a matter which is of so great consequence to us and which touches us so profoundly that we must have lost all feeling to be indifferent about it.
• The knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him.
• The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.
• The sensitivity of men to small matters, and their indifference to great ones, indicates a strange inversion.
• The strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts.
• The struggle alone pleases us, not the victory.
• There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.
• There are two kinds of people one can call reasonable: those who serve God with all their heart because they know him, and those who seek him with all their heart because they do not know him.
• There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.
• 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.
• Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves.
• To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.
• Too much and too little wine. Give him none, he cannot find truth give him too much, the same.
• Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.
• Two things control men's nature, instinct and experience.
• Vanity of science. Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science.
• We know the truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart.
• We like security: we like the pope to be infallible in matters of faith, and grave doctors to be so in moral questions so that we can feel reassured.
• When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before.