"Extremes are for us as though they..." - Quote by Blaise Pascal

“The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.”

“If we do not know ourselves to be full of pride, ambition, lust, weakness, misery, and injustice, we are indeed blind. And if, knowing this, we do not desire deliverance, what can we say of a man...?”

“I have spent much time in the study of the abstract sciences; but the paucity of persons with whom you can communicate on such subjects disgusted me with them. When I began to study man, I saw that these abstract sciences are not suited to him, and that in diving into them, I wandered farther from my real object than those who knew them not, and I forgave them for not having attended to these things. I expected then, however, that I should find some companions in the study of man, since it was so specifically a duty. I was in error. There are fewer students of man than of geometry.”

“For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.”

“Among human beings there is no greater banality than death. Second in order, because it is possible to die without being born, comes birth, and next comes marriage.”

“Happiness is not the portion of man.”

“Since [man] is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the nothing from which he was made, and the infinite in which he is swallowed up.”

“To act without clear understanding, to form habits without investigation, to follow a path all one's life without knowing where it really leads; such is the behavior of the multitude.”

“On the heights it is warmer than those in the valley imagine.”