Home > Author > Blaise Pascal
41 " Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. "
― Blaise Pascal , Pensées
42 " 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...? "
43 " The knowledge of God without that of man's misery causes pride. The knowledge of man's misery without that of God causes despair. The knowledge of Jesus Christ is the middle course, because in Him we find both God and our misery. "
44 " Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. "
― Blaise Pascal
45 " People often mistake their imagination for their heart, & so often are convinced they are converted as soon as they start thinking of becoming converted. "
― Blaise Pascal , The Mind on Fire: A Faith for the Skeptical and Indifferent
46 " Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism. "
47 " Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much "
48 " Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it. "
49 " People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others. "
50 " Finally, let them recognise that 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. "
51 " Eloquence is painted thought, and thus those who, after having painted it, add somewhat more, make a picture, not a portrait. "
52 " The last thing one knows when writing a book is what to put first. "
53 " All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit quiet in a room alone. "
54 " Men seek rest in a struggle against difficulties; and when they have conquered these, rest becomes insufferable. "
55 " The art of opposition and of revolution is to unsettle established customs, sounding them even to their source, to point out their want of authority and justice. "
56 " What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, an imbecile worm; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe. "
57 " Eloquence.— We need both what is pleasing and what is real, but that which pleases must itself be drawn from the true. "
58 " In every action we must look beyond the action at our past, present and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all these things. "
59 " I lay it down as a fact that if all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world. "
60 " When I consider the small span of my life absorbed in the eternity of all time, or the small part of space which I can touch or see engulfed by the infinite immensity of spaces that I know not and that know me not, I am frightened and astonished to see myself here instead of there … now instead of then. "