Blaise Pascal (June 19, 1623 – August 19, 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher.
- We make an idol of truth itself; for truth apart from charity is not God, but His image and idol.
- All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.
- All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room.
- As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.
- 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.
- Do you wish people to think well of you? Don't speak well of yourself.
- Human beings must be known to be loved; but Divine beings must be loved to be known.
- If our condition were truly happy, we would not seek diversion from it in order to make ourselves happy.
- If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.
- 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.
- It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist.
- It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.
- Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much.
- Little things console us because little things afflict us.
- Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.
- Men blaspheme what they do not know.
- Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.
- Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
- Noble deeds that are concealed are most esteemed.
- Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.
- 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.
- Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.
- Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.
- The charm of fame is so great that we like every object to which it is attached, even death.
- The consciousness of the falsity of present pleasures, and the ignorance of the vanity of absent pleasures, cause inconstancy.
- The gospel to me is simply irresistible.
- 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 reasons that reason cannot know.
- 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 last act is bloody, however pleasant all the rest of the play is: a little earth is thrown at last upon our head, and that is the end forever.
- The last proceeding of reason is to recognize that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it. There is nothing so conformable to reason as this disavowal of reason.
- The only shame is to have none.
- 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 supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.
- 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.
- Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.
- We conceal it from ourselves in vain - we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.
- We never love a person, but only qualities.
- When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before.
- You always admire what you really don't understand.
- How vain is painting, which is admired for reproducing the likeness of things whose originals are not admired.
- If it is an extraordinary blindness to live without investigating what we are, it is a terrible one to live an evil life, while believing in God.
- If we do not know ourselves to be full of pride, ambition, lust, weakness, misery, and injustice, we are indeed blind. And if, knowing this, we do not desire deliverance, what can we say of a man...?
- In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't.
- Instead of complaining that God had hidden Himself, you will give Him thanks for not having revealed so much of Himself; and you will also give Him thanks for not having revealed Himself to haughty sages, unworthy to know so holy a God.
- It is false zeal to keep truth while wounding charity.
- Sleep, you say, is the image of death; for my part I say that it is rather the image of life.