Blaise Pascal Quotes

Continued eloquence is wearisome.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

Now, if the passions had no hold on us, a week and a hundred years would amount to the same.

Let each of us examine his thoughts

It is right that what is just should be obeyed. It is necessary that what is strongest should be obeyed.

All our life passes in this way: we seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces.

Don't try to add more years to your life. Better add more life to your years.

If we dreamed the same thing every night, it would affect us much as the objects we see every day. And if a common workman were sure to dream every night for twelve hours that he was a king, I believe he would be almost as happy as a king who should dream every night for twelve hours on end that he was a common workman.

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 a mind. This isthe consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being.

Eloquence is a painting of thought; and thus those who, after having painted it, add something more, make a picture instead of a portrait.

Let man then contemplate nature in full and lofty majesty, and turn his eyes away from the mean objects which surround him. Let him look at the dazzling light hung aloft as an eternal lamp to lighten the universe; let him behold the earth, a mere dot compared with the vast circuit which that orb describes, and stand amazed to find that the vast circuit itself is but a very fine point compared with the orbit traced by the starts as they roll their course on high.

Man's greatness is great in that he knows himself wretched. A tree does not know itself wretched. It is then being wretched to know oneself wretched; but it is being great to know that one is wretched.

Who can doubt that we exist only to love? Disguise it, in fact, as we will, we love without intermission... We live not a moment exempt from its influence.

Those are weaklings who know the truth and uphold it as long as it suits their purpose, and then abandon it.

Dull minds are never either intuitive or mathematical.

The weather and my mood have little connection. I have my foggy and my fine days within me; my prosperity or misfortune has little to do with the matter.

All mankind's unhappiness derives from one thing: his inability to know how to remain in repose in one room.

Extremes are for us as though they were not, and we are not within their notice. They escape us, or we them. This is our true state; this is what makes us incapable of certain knowledge and of absolute ignorance... This is our natural condition, and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses.

True eloquence makes light of eloquence, true morality makes light of morality; that is to say, the morality of the judgment, which has no rules, makes light of the morality of the intellect.... To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

Knowledge has two extremes. The first is the pure natural ignorance in which all men find themselves at birth. The other extreme is that reached by great minds, who, having run through all that men can know, find they know nothing, and come back again to that same natural ignorance from which they set out; this is a learned ignorance which is conscious of itself.

There are two excesses: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason. The supreme achievement of reason is to realise that there is a limit to reason. Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go as far as to realise that.

Force and not opinion is the queen of the world; but it is opinion that uses the force.[Fr., La force est la reine du monde, et non pas l'opinion; mais l'opinion est celle qui use de la force.]

The heart has arguments with which the logic of mind is not aquainted.

Continuity in everything is unpleasant.

The stream is always purer at its source.[Fr., Les choses valent toujours mieux dans leur source.]

Losses are comparative; imagination only makes them of any moment.

Reason is the slow and torturous method by which those who do not know the truth discover it

Vanity is illustrated in the cause and effect of love, as in the case of Cleopatra.

Flies are so mighty that they win battles, paralyse our minds, eat up our bodies.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

What a strange vanity painting is; it attracts admiration by resembling the original, we do not admire.

Not to be mad is another form of madness

The sum of a man's problems come from his inability to be alone in a silent room.

The method of not erring is sought by all the world. The logicians profess to guide it, the geometricians alone attain it, and apart from science, and the imitations of it, there are notrue demonstrations.

Plurality which is not reduced to unity is confusion; unity which does not depend on plurality is tyranny.

Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too.

Le moi est ha|«s sable. The self is hateful.

Thought makes the whole dignity of man; therefore endeavor to think well, that is the only morality.

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.

There should be in eloquence that which is pleasing and that which is real; but that which is pleasing should itself be real.

Eloquence; it requires the pleasant and the real; but the pleasant must itself be drawn from the true.

When some passion or effect is described in a natural style, we find within ourselves the truth of what we hear, without knowing it was there.

There is no arena in which vanity displays itself under such a variety of forms as in conversation.

Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves.

I can approve of those only who seek in tears for happiness.

Discourses on humility are a source of pride in the vain and of humility in the humble.

Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.

Love has reasons which reason cannot understand.

The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.

You are in the same manner surrounded with a small circle of persons... full of desire. They demand of you the benefits of desire... You are therefore properly the king of desire. ...equalin this to the greatest kings of the earth... It is desire that constitutes their power; that is, the possession of things that men covet.

The mind must not be forced; artificial and constrained manners fill it with foolish presumption, through unnatural elevation and vain and ridiculous inflation, instead of solid andvigorous nutriment.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

I feel engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified The eternal silence of these infinite spaces alarms me.

For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.

Any unity which doesn't have its origin in the multitudes is tyranny.

Our true dignity consists — in thought. Thence we must derive our elevation, not from space or duration. Let us endeavor then to think well; this is the principle of morals.

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

Mediocrity makes the most of its native possessions.

The end point of rationality is to demonstrate the limits of rationality.