Lynn > Lynn's Quotes

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

“I made this [letter] very long, because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter.”
― Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters

“To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

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

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

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

“Dull minds are never either intuitive or mathematical.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

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

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

“People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.”
― Blaise Pascal, De l'art de persuader

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

“People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“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

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

“And is it not obvious that, just as it is a crime to disturb the peace when truth reigns, it is also a crime to remain at peace when the truth is being destroyed?”
― Blaise Pascal

“Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.”
― Blaise Pascal

“Symmetry is what we see at a glance; based on the fact that there is no reason for any difference...”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

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

“When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.”
― Blaise Pascal

“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.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

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

“Nature has made all her truths independent of one another. Our art makes one dependent on the other.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“To understand is to forgive.”
― Pascal

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

“I ask you neither for health nor for sickness, for life nor for death; but that you may dispose of my health and my sickness, my life and my death, for your glory ... You alone know what is expedient for me; you are the sovereign master, do with me according to your will. Give to me, or take away from me, only conform my will to yours. I know but one thing, Lord, that it is good to follow you, and bad to offend you. Apart from that, I know not what is good or bad in anything. I know not which is most profitable to me, health or sickness, wealth or poverty, nor anything else in the world. That discernment is beyond the power of men or angels, and is hidden among the secrets of your providence, which I adore, but do not seek to fathom.”
― Blaise Pascal

“Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.”
― Blaise Pascal

“There is a certain standard of grace and beauty which consists in a certain relation between our nature... and the thing which pleases us.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“There is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition”
― Blaise Pascal