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| Blaise Pascal: born June 1623 died August 1662 was a famous French philosopher, author, and physicis |
Quotes by Blaise Pascal
Men’s grandeur stems from his knowledge of his own misery; a tree does not know itself to be miserable.Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to the mind.
As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.
Mathematicians have exact minds, provided all things are explained to them by means of definitions and axioms; otherwise they are inaccurate and insufferable, for they are only right when the principles are quite clear.
We desire truth, and find within ourselves only uncertainty. We seek happiness, and find only misery and death.
The ordinary life of men is like that of the saints. They all seek their satisfaction, and differ only in the object in which they place it; they call those their enemies who hinder them.
When malice has reason on its side, it becomes proud and displays reason in its entire splendor.
Human society is founded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each knew what his friend said of him in his absence.
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it conscientiously.
Truly it is an evil to be full of faults; but it is still greater evil to be full of them, and to be unwilling to recognize them.
For in fact what is man in nature? A nothing in comparison with the infinite, an all in comparison with nothing, a mean between nothing and everything.
We conceal it from ourselves in vain; we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.
The strength of a man’s virtue must not be measured by his efforts, but by his ordinary life.
All I know is that I must soon die, but what I know least is this very death which I cannot escape.
All men naturally hate one another. They employ lust as far as possible in the service of the public weal. But this is only a pretense and a false image of love; for at bottom it is only hate.
There must be feeling of humility, not from nature, but from penitence, not to rest in them, but to go on to greatness.
In each 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 those things; and then we shall be very cautious.
Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.
The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views.
Reason commands us far more imperiously than a master; in disobeying the latter we are made unhappy, in disobeying the former, fools.
We conceal it from ourselves in vain; we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.
Thus we never live, but we hope to live; and always disposing ourselves to be happy, it is inevitable that we never become so.
Cleopatra’s nose had it been shorter; it would have changed the history of the world.
By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.
Between us and heaven and hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.
There is a pleasure in being in a ship beaten about by a storm, when we are sure that it will not flounder.
Lust and force are the source of all our actions; lust causes voluntary actions, force involuntary ones.
We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves.
Those honor nature well, who teach that she can speak on anything, even on theology.
The most powerful cause of error is the war existing between the senses and reason.
The power of kings is founded on the reason and on the folly of the people, and especially on their folly.
The charm of fame is so great that we like every object to which it is attached, even death.
Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would be another form of madness.
I have discovered that all human evil comes from this; man’s being unable to sit still in a room.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.
It is not permitted to the most equitable of men to be a judge in his own cause.
The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.
The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first.
We know the truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart.
