Blaise Pascal
Knowledge has two extremes. The first is the pure natural ignorance in which all men find themselves at birth. The other extreme is that reached by great minds, who, having run through all that men can know, find they know nothing, and come back again to that same natural ignorance from which they set out; this is a learned ignorance which is conscious of itself.Collection: Running
If we submit everything to reason our religion will be left with nothing mysterious or supernatural. If we offend the principles of reason our religion will be absurd and ridiculous . . . There are two equally dangerous extremes: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason.Collection: Two
Amusement allures and deceives us and leads us down imperceptibly in thoughtlessness to the graveCollection: Amusement
Civil wars are the greatest of evils. They are inevitable, if we wish to reward merit, for all will say that they are meritorious.Collection: War
Generally we are occupied either with the miseries which now we feel, or with those which threaten; and even when we see ourselves sufficiently secure from the approach of either, still fretfulness, though unwarranted by either present or expected affliction, fails not to spring up from the deep recesses of the heart, where its roots naturally grow, and to fill the soul with its poison.Collection: Spring
When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing.Collection: Book
they do not know that they seek only the chase and not the quarry.Collection: Quarry
We desire truth, and find within ourselves only uncertainty. We seek happiness, and find only misery and death. We cannot but desire truth and happiness, and are incapable of certainty or happiness.Collection: Desire
To go beyond the bounds of moderation is to outrage humanity. The greatness of the human soul is shown by knowing how to keep within proper bounds. There are two equally dangerous extremes- to shut reason out, and not to let nothing in.Collection: Greatness
There is a lot of difference between tempting and leading into error. God tempts but does not lead into error. To tempt is to provide opportunities for us to do certain things if we do not love God, but putting us under no necessity to do so. To lead into error is to compel a man necessarily to conclude and follow a falsehood.Collection: Opportunity
In proportion as our own mind is enlarged we discover a greater number of men of originality. Commonplace people see no difference between one man and another.Collection: Appreciation
It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.Collection: Government
I do not admire a virtue like valour when it is pushed to excess, if I do not see at the same time the excess of the opposite virtue, as one does in Epaminondas, who displayed extreme valour and extreme benevolence. For otherwise it is not an ascent, but a fall. We do not display our greatness by placing ourselves at one extremity, but rather by being at both at the same time, and filling up the whole of the space between them.Collection: Fall
We are so presumptuous that we should like to be known all over the world, even by people who will only come when we are no more. Such is our vanity that the good opinion of half a dozen of the people around us gives us pleasure and satisfaction.Collection: Math
Continuous eloquence is tedious.Collection: Teaching
How vain is painting, which is admired for reproducing the likeness of things whose originals are not admired.Collection: Vanity
The imagination disposes of everything. It creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are the whole of the world.Collection: Inspirational
It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have all one wants.Collection: Freedom
Description of man: dependence, longing for independence, need.Collection: Men
All who say the same things do not possess them in the same manner; and hence the incomparable author of the Art of Conversation pauses with so much care to make it understood that we must not judge of the capacity of a man by the excellence of a happy remark that we heard him make. Let us penetrate, says he, the mind from which it proceeds. It will oftenest be seen that he will be made to disavow it on the spot, and will be drawn very far from this better thought in which he does not believe, to plunge himself into another, quite base and ridiculous.Collection: Art
Not the zeal alone of those who seek Him proves God, but the blindness of those who seek Him not.Collection: Blindness
We make an idol of truth itself; for truth apart from charity is not God, but His image and idol, which we must neither love nor worship.Collection: Love
We know then the existence and nature of the finite, because we also are finite and have extension. We know the existence of the infinite and are ignorant of its nature, because it has extension like us, but not limits like us. But we know neither the existence nor the nature of God, because he has neither extension nor limits.Collection: God
We are so presumptuous that we wish to be known to all the world, even to those who come after us; and we are so vain that the esteem of five or six persons immediately around us is enough to amuse and satisfy us.Collection: Vanity
There is a certain standard of grace and beauty which consists in a certain relation between our nature, such as it is, weak or strong, and the thing which pleases us. Whatever is formed according to this standard pleases us, be it house, song, discourse, verse, prose, woman, birds, rivers, trees, room, dress, and so on. Whatever is not made according to this standard displeases those who have good taste.Collection: Beauty
Our imagination so magnifies this present existence, by the power of continual reflection on it, and so attenuates eternity, by not thinking of it at all, that we reduce an eternity to nothingness, and expand a mere nothing to an eternity; and this habit is so inveterately rooted in us that all the force of reason cannot induce us to lay it aside.Collection: Thinking
Il y a deux sortes d'esprits, l'un ge ome trique, et l'autre que l'on peut appeler de finesse. Le premier a des vues lentes, dures et inflexibles; mais le dernier a une souplesse de pense e. There are two kinds of mind, one mathematical, the other what one might call the intuitive. The first takes a slow, firm, inflexible view, but the latter has flexibility of thought.Collection: Views
At the centre of every human being is a God-shaped vacuum which can only be filled by Jesus Christ.Collection: Jesus
As we speak of poetical beauty, so ought we to speak of mathematical beauty and medical beauty. But we do not do so; and that reason is that we know well what is the object of mathematics, and that it consists in proofs, and what is the object of medicine, and that it consists in healing. But we do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry.Collection: Beauty
The two principles of truth, reason and senses, are not only both not genuine, but are engaged in mutual deception. The senses deceive reason through false appearances, and the senses are disturbed by passions, which produce false impressions.Collection: Passion
A little thing comforts us because a little thing afflicts us.Collection: Comfort
There was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present.Collection: Happiness
To speak freely of mathematics, I find it the highest exercise of the spirit; but at the same time I know that it is so useless that I make little distinction between a man who is only a mathematician and a common artisan. Also, I call it the most beautiful profession in the world; but it is only a profession.Collection: Beautiful
To find recreation in amusements is not happiness; for this joy springs from alien and extrinsic sources, and is therefore dependent upon and subject to interruption by a thousand accidents, which may minister inevitable affliction.Collection: Spring
I bring you the gift of these four words: I believe in you.Collection: Appreciation
Mankind suffers from two excesses: to exclude reason, and to live by nothing but reason.Collection: Two
There is a God-shaped vacuum in every heart.Collection: Spiritual
Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light is throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.Collection: Mean
Faith is a gift of God.Collection: Gift From God
All the troubles of life come upon us because we refuse to sit quietly for a while each day in our rooms.Collection: Prayer
The more intelligent a man is, the more originality he discovers in others.Collection: Intelligent
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
If you do not love too much, you do not love enough.Collection: Too Much
Man is obviously made for thinking. Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought.Collection: Lying
All the maxims have been written. It only remains to put them into practice.Collection: Practice
To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize.Collection: Philosophy
No religion except ours has taught that man is born in sin; none of the philosophical sects has admitted it; none therefore has spoken the truthCollection: Philosophical
Human life is thus only an endless illusion. Men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does when we are gone. Society is based on mutual hypocrisy.Collection: Men
It is impossible on reasonable grounds to disbelieve miracles.Collection: Miracle