Blaise Pascal quotes - page 10

To go beyond the bounds of moderation is to outrage humanity. (Blaise Pascal)
We are usually convinced more easily by reasons we have found ourselves than by those which have occurred to others.
Blaise Pascal
How vain is painting, which is admired for reproducing the likeness of things whose originals are not admired.
Blaise Pascal
Reverend Fathers, my letters did not usually follow each other at such close intervals, nor were they so long.,,, This one would not be so long had I but the leisure to make it shorter.
Blaise Pascal
Things are always at their best in their beginning.
Blaise Pascal
No soul of high estate can take pleasure in slander. It betrays a weakness.
Blaise Pascal
It is your own assent to yourself, and the constant voice of your own reason, and not of others, that should make you believe.
Blaise Pascal
It is not permitted to the most equitable of men to be a judge in his own cause.
Blaise Pascal
The origins of disputes between philosophers is, that one class of them have undertaken to raise man by displaying his greatness, and the other to debase him by showing his miseries.
Blaise Pascal
True eloquence makes light of eloquence. True morality makes light of morality.
Blaise Pascal
Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he feels his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness. (Blaise Pascal)
True eloquence scorns eloquence.
Blaise Pascal
Christianity is strange. It bids man recognise that he is vile, even abominable, and bids him desire to be like God. Without such a counterpoise, this dignity would make him horribly vain, or this humiliation would make him terribly abject.
Blaise Pascal
We are so presumptuous that we should like to be known all over the world, even by people who will only come when we are no more. Such is our vanity that the good opinion of half a dozen of the people around us gives us pleasure and satisfaction.
Blaise Pascal
Perfect clarity would profit the intellect but damage the will.
Blaise Pascal
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 vapor, 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 nothing of this.
Blaise Pascal
It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom by thought I comprehend the world.
Blaise Pascal
If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.
Blaise Pascal
The war existing between the senses and reason.
Blaise Pascal
The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.
Blaise Pascal
However vast a man's spiritual resources, he is capable of but one great passion. (Blaise Pascal)
I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he would have been quite willing to dispense with God. But he had to make Him give a fillip to set the world in motion beyond this, he has no further need of God.
Blaise Pascal
Religion is so great a thing that it is right that those who will not take the trouble to seek it if it be obscure, should be deprived of it.
Blaise Pascal
Those who are accustomed to judge by feeling do not understand the process of reasoning, because they want to comprehend at a glance and are not used to seeking for first principles. Those, on the other hand, who are accustomed to reason from first principles do not understand matters of feeling at all, because they look for first principles and are unable to comprehend at a glance.
Blaise Pascal
The multitude which is not brought to act as a unity, is confusion. That unity which has not its origin in the multitude is tyranny.
Blaise Pascal