Blaise Pascal > Quotes

“The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.”
― Blaise Pascal

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter."

(Letter 16, 1657)”
― Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters

“We can only know God well when we know our own sin. And those who have known God without knowing their wretchedness have not glorified Him but have glorified themselves.”
― Blaise Pascal

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
― Blaise Pascal

“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.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensees

“You always admire what you really don't understand.”
― Blaise Pascal

“Kind words don't cost much. Yet they accomplish much.”
― Blaise Pascal

“Few friendships would survive if each one knew what his friend says of him behind his back”
― Blaise Pascal

“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.”
― Blaise Pascal

“In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadow for those who don't.”
― Blaise Pascal

“All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.”
― Blaise Pascal

“Il n'est pas certain que tout soit incertain.
(Translation: It is not certain that everything is uncertain.)”
― Blaise Pascal, Pascal's Pensees

“Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.”
― Blaise Pascal

“Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize.”
― Blaise Pascal

“People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.”
― Blaise Pascal

“I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.”
― Blaise Pascal

“The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Man's sensitivity to the little things and insensitivity to the greatest are the signs of a strange disorder.”
― Blaise Pascal

“When one does not love too much, one does not love enough.”
― Blaise Pascal

“Little things comfort us because little things distress us.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées and Other Writings

“Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what it loves.”
― Blaise Pascal

“Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism.”
― Blaise Pascal

“It is man's natural sickness to believe that he possesses the Truth.”
― Blaise Pascal

“We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensees

“Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.”
― Blaise Pascal

“Knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride. Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair. Knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance because he shows us both God and our own wretchedness.”
― Blaise Pascal

“Let it not be imagined that the life of a good Christian must be a life of melancholy and gloominess; for he only resigns some pleasures to enjoy others infinitely better.”
― Blaise Pascal

“Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?”
― Blaise Pascal