Home > Work > Pensées
61 " If our state were really happy, we should not need to take our minds off it in order to make ourselves happy. "
― Blaise Pascal , Pensées
62 " Weaklings are those who know the truth, but maintain it only as far as it is in their interest to do so, and apart from that forsake it. "
63 " We are so unhappy that we can only enjoy something which we should be annoyed to see go wrong, and that can and does constantly happen to thousands of things. Anyone who found the secret of rejoicing when things go well without being annoyed when they go badly would have found the point. It is perpetual motion. "
64 " Our own interest is another wonderful instrument for blinding us agreeably. "
65 " Multiplicity which is not reduced to unity is confusion. Unity which does not depend on multiplicity is tyranny. "
66 " What a great advantage to be of noble birth, since it gives a man of eighteen the standing, recognition and respect that another man might not earn before he was fifty. That means winning thirty years’ start with no effort. "
67 " Symmetry is what we see at a glance; based on the fact that there is no reason for any difference... "
68 " Men spend their time in following a ball or a hare; it is the pleasure even of kings. "
69 " As we cannot be universal by knowing everything there is to be known about everything, we must know a little about everything, because it is much better to know something about everything than everything about something. "
70 " Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort.Then he faces his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness.And at once there wells up from the depths of his soul boredom, gloom, depression, chagrin, resentment, despair. "
71 " We do not choose as captain of a ship the most highly born of those aboard. "
72 " There is nothing so consistent with reason as this denial of reason. "
73 " A trifle consoles us because a trifle upsets us. "
74 " The Jesuits have tried to combine God and the world, and have only earned the contempt of God and the world. "
75 " Bu sonsuz mekânların ebedi suskunluğu beni ürkütüyor. "
76 " All men naturally hate each other. We have used concupiscence as best we can to make it serve the common good, but this is mere sham and a false image of charity, for essentially it is just hate. "
77 " The manner in which Epictetus, Montaigne, and Salomon de Tultie wrote, is the most usual, the most suggestive, the most remembered, and the oftener quoted; because it is entirely composed of thoughts born from the common talk of life. "
78 " Eloquence. There must be elements both pleasing and real, but what is pleasing must itself be drawn from what is true. "
79 " Two excesses: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason. "
80 " How I hate these follies of not believing in the Eucharist, &c.! If the Gospel be true, if Jesus Christ be God, what difficulty is there? "