Blaise Pascal
The great mass of people judge well of things, for they are in natural ignorance, which is man's true state.Collection: Ignorance
Nature has made all her truths independent of one another. Our art makes one dependent on the other. But this is not natural. Each keeps its own place.Collection: Art
I should not be a Christian but for the miracles.Collection: Christian
All this visible world is but an imperceptible point in the ample bosom of nature.Collection: Nature
The imagination enlarges little objects so as to fill our souls with a fantastic estimate; and, with rash insolence, it belittles the great to its own measure, as when talking of God.Collection: Talking
Dans une grande a" me tout est grand. In a great soul everything isgreat.Collection: Soul
Who dispenses reputation? Who makes us respect and revere persons, works, laws, the great? Who but this faculty of imagination? All the riches of the earth are inadequate without its approval.Collection: Law
The gist is that good and evil are foreordained. What is foreordained comes necessarily to be after a prior act of divine volition...Rather, everything small and large is written and comes to be in a known and expected measure.Collection: Evil
Admiration spoils all from infancy.Collection: Admiration
Nothing is more dastardly than to act with bravado toward God.Collection: God
Human life is thus only a perpetual illusion; men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does of us in our absence. Human society is founded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each knew what his friend said of him in his absence, although he then spoke in sincerity and without passion.Collection: Passion
Love has no age as it is always renewing itself.Collection: Anniversary
Curiosity is only vanity. Most frequently we wish not to know, but to talk. We would not take a sea voyage for the sole pleasure of seeing without hope of ever telling.Collection: Vanity
However vast a man's spiritual resources, he is capable of but one great passion.Collection: Spiritual
No animal admires another animal.Collection: Animal
The exterior must be joined to the interior to obtain anything from God, that is to say, we must kneel, pray with the lips, and soon, in order that proud man, who would not submit himself to God, may be now subject to the creature.Collection: Men
It is an appalling thing to feel all one possesses drain away.Collection: Drains
I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he would have been quite willing to dispense with God. But he had to make Him give a fillip to set the world in motion; beyond this, he has no further need of God.Collection: Philosophy
Necessity, that great refuge and excuse for human frailty, breaks through all law; and he is not to be accounted in fault whose crime is not the effect of choice, but force.Collection: Law
Is it courage in a dying man to go, in weakness and in agony, to affront an almighty and eternal God?Collection: Death
That which makes us go so far for love is that we never think that we might have need of anything besides that which we love.Collection: Love Is
Custom creates the whole of equity, for the simple reason that it is accepted.Collection: Simple
It is your own assent to yourself, and the constant voice of your own reason, and not of others, that should make you believe.Collection: Believe
It is man's natural sickness to believe that he possesses the Truth.Collection: Truth
The God of the infinite is the God of the infinitesimal.Collection: Infinite
Tout notre raisonnement se re duit a' ce der au sentiment. All our reasoning comes down to surrendering to feeling.Collection: Feelings
The only thing which consoles for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries. For it is this which principally hinders us from reflecting upon ourselves and which makes us imperceptibly ruin ourselves.Collection: Sadness
All our reasoning boils down to yielding to sentiment.Collection: Sentiments
Imagination cannot make fools wise, but it makes them happy, as against reason, which only makes its friends wretched: one covers them with glory, the other with shame.Collection: Wise
Education produces natural intuitions, and natural intuitions are erased by education.Collection: Education
Losses are comparative; imagination only makes them of any moment.Collection: Gratitude
When a natural discourse paints a passion or an effect, one feels within oneself the truth of what one reads, which was there before, although one did not know it. Hence one is inclined to love him who makes us feel it, for he has not shown us his own riches, but ours. ...such community of intellect that we have with him necessarily inclines the heart to love.Collection: Life
Custom determines what is agreeable.Collection: Determine
[Christianity] endeavors equally to establish these two things: that God has set up in the Church visible signs to make himself known to those who should seek him sincerely, and that he has nevertheless so disguised them that he will only be perceived by those who seek him with all their heart.Collection: Faith
Now, if the passions had no hold on us, a week and a hundred years would amount to the same.Collection: Time
If man were happy, he would be the more so, the less he was diverted, like the saints and God.Collection: Happiness
Mediocrity makes the most of its native possessions.Collection: Mediocrity
When we do not know the truth of a thing, it is good that there should exist a common error which determines the mind of man, as, for example, the moon, to which is attributed the change of seasons, the progress of diseases, etc. For the chief malady of man is a restless curiosity about things which he cannot understand; and it is not so bad for him to be in error as to be curious to no purpose.Collection: Truth
Extremes are for us as though they were not, and we are not within their notice. They escape us, or we them. This is our true state; this is what makes us incapable of certain knowledge and of absolute ignorance... This is our natural condition, and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses.Collection: Ignorance
The origins of disputes between philosophers is, that one class of them have undertaken to raise man by displaying his greatness, and the other to debase him by showing his miseries.Collection: Greatness
We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we endeavor to shine. We labor unceasingly to adorn and preserve this imaginary existence and neglect the real.Collection: Real
La vraie e loquence se moque de l'e loquence, la vraie morale se moque de la morale. True eloquence has notime foreloquence, true morality has no time for morality.Collection: Time
The mind of the greatest man on earth is not so independent of circumstances as not to feel inconvenienced by the merest buzzing noise about him; it does not need the report of a cannon to disturb his thoughts. The creaking of a vane or a pully is quite enough. Do not wonder that he reasons ill just now; a fly is buzzing by his ear; it is quite enough to unfit him for giving good counsel.Collection: Independent
Rivers are roads which move, and which carry us whither we desire to go.Collection: Moving
All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.Collection: Hipster
In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.Collection: Christian
It’s not those who write the laws that have the greatest impact on society. It’s those who write the songs.Collection: Song
If you want to be a real seeker of truth, you need to, at least once in your lifetime, doubt in, as much as it’s possible, in everything.Collection: Real
Habit is the second nature which destroys the first.Collection: Firsts