Quotes By Blaise Pascal

Continuous eloquence wearies. Grandeur must be abandoned to be appreciated. Continuity in everything is unpleasant. Cold is agreeable, that we may get warm.

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.

If all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.

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.

When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before.

Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason.

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.

Desire and force between them are responsible for all our actions; desire causes our voluntary acts, force our involuntary.

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

The gospel to me is simply irresistible.

If we must not act save on a certainty, we ought not to act on religion, for it is not certain. But how many things we do on an uncertainty, sea voyages, battles!

The knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him.

Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.

Happiness is neither without us nor within us. It is in God, both without us and within us.

We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.

Faith is different from proof; the latter is human, the former is a Gift from God.

We never love a person, but only qualities.

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?

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.

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.

Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

The sensitivity of men to small matters, and their indifference to great ones, indicates a strange inversion.

If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.

Atheism shows strength of mind, but only to a certain degree.

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.

The strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts.

Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.

The self is hateful.