Blaise Pascal Quotes

Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them.

This is what I see, and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and everywhere I see nothing but obscurity. Nature offers me nothing that is not a matter of doubt and disquiet.

We must learn our limits. We are all something, but none of us are everything.

Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.

That queen, of error, whom we call fancy and opinion, is the more deceitful because she does not always deceive. She would be the infallible rule of truth if she were the infallible rule of falsehood; but being only most frequently in error, she gives no evidence of her real quality, for she marks with the same character both that which is true and that which is false.

We are usually convinced more easily by reasons we have found ourselves than by those which have occurred to others.

Things are always at their best in their beginning.

No one is ignorant that there are two avenues by which opinions are received into the soul, which are its two principal powers: the understanding and the will.

Too much and too little wine. Give him none, he cannot find truth; give him too much, the same.

It's not those who write the laws that have the greatest impact on society. It's those who write the songs.

From whence comes it that a cripple in body does not irritate us, and that a crippled mind enrages us? It is because a cripple sees that we go right, and a distorted mind says that it is we who go astray. But for that we should have more pity and less rage.

Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason.

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

Quelque e tendue d'esprit que l'on ait, l'on n'est capable que d'une grande passion. However vast a man's spirit, he is only capable of one great passion.

There are two types of mind . . . the mathematical, and what might be called the intuitive. The former arrives at its views slowly, but they are firm and rigid; the latter is endowed with greater flexibility and applies itself simultaneously to the diverse lovable parts of that which it loves.

All of our miseries prove our greatness. They are the miseries of a dethroned monarch.

The state of man is inconstancy, ennui, anxiety.

Those who write against vanity want the glory of having written well, and their readers the glory of reading well, and I who write this have the same desire, as perhaps those who read this have also.

Justice is what is established; and thus all our established laws will necessarily be regarded as just without examination, since they are established.

Let us, then, take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the infinite. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature.

All men seek happiness. There are no exceptions.... This is the motive of every act of every man, including those who go and hang themselves.

The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.

The world is ruled by force, not by opinion; but opinion uses force.

Our senses will not admit anything extreme. Too much noise confuses us, too much light dazzles us, too great distance or nearness prevents vision, too great prolixity or brevity weakens an argument, too much pleasure gives pain, too much accordance annoys.

Il n'est pas certain que tout soit incertain. (Translation: It is not certain that everything is uncertain.)

Wisdom leads us back to childhood.

Man lives between the infinitely large and the infinitely small.

Men blaspheme what they do not know.

That which makes us go so far for love is that we never think that we might have need of anything besides that which we love.

We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves.

We must know where to doubt, where to feel certain, where to submit. He who does not do so, understands not the force of reason.

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.

We see neither justice nor injustice which does not change its nature with change in climate. Three degrees of latitude reverse all jurisprudence; a meridian decides the truth.

We are fools to depend upon the society of our fellow-men. Wretched as we are, powerless as we are, they will not aid us; we shall die alone.

In proportion as our own mind is enlarged we discover a greater number of men of originality. Commonplace people see no difference between one man and another.

How shall one who is so weak in his childhood become really strong when he grows older? We only change our fancies.

Sneezing absorbs all the functions of the soul just as much as the [sexual] act, but we do not draw from it the same conclusions against the greatness of man, because it is involuntary; although we bring it about, we do so involuntarily. It is not for the sake of the thing in itself but for another end, and is therefore not a sign of man's weakness, or his subjection to this act.

The mind has its arrangement; it proceeds from principles to demonstrations. The heart has a different mode of proceeding.

Having been unable to strengthen justice, we have justified strength.

What matters it that man should have a little more knowledge of the universe? If he has it, he gets little higher. Is he not always infinitely removed from the end, and is not the duration of our life equally removed from eternity, even if it lasts ten years longer?

Those we call the ancients were really new in everything.

Fear not, provided you fear; but if you fear not, then fear.

Nobody is publicly accepted as an expert on poetry unless he displays the sign of poet, mathematician, etc., but universal men want no sign and make hardly any distinction between the crafts of poet and embroiderer. Universal men are not called poets or mathematicians, etc. But they are all these things and judges of them too. No one could guess what they are, and they will talk about whatever was being talked about when they came in. One quality is not more noticeable in them than another, unless it becomes necessary to put it into practice, and then we remember it.

When a natural discourse paints a passion or an effect, one feels within oneself the truth of what one reads, which was there before, although one did not know it. Hence one is inclined to love him who makes us feel it, for he has not shown us his own riches, but ours. ...such community of intellect that we have with him necessarily inclines the heart to love.

Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.

Nature confuses the skeptics and reason confutes the dogmatists

Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him: a vapour, a drop of water is enough to kill him. but even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows none of this.

Man's grandeur is that he knows himself to be miserable.

There are two equally dangerous extremes-to shut reason out, and to let nothing else in.

That dog is mine said those poor children; that place in the sun is mine; such is the beginning and type of usurpation throughout the earth.[Fr., Ce chien est a moi, disaient ces pauvres enfants; c'est la ma place au soleil. Voila le commencement et l'image de l'usurpation de toute la terre.]

The self is hateful.

When intuition and logic agree, you are always right.

We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. When we think to attach ourselves to any pointand to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes for ever. Nothing stays for us.

We must kill them in war, just because they live beyond the river. If they lived on this side, we would be called murderers.

The more intelligent a man is, the more originality he discovers in others.

We must keep our thought secret, and judge everything by it, while talking like the people.

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

The best defense against logic is ignorance.

Everyone, without exception, is searching for happiness.

All sorrow has its root in man's inability to sit quiet in a room by himself.