Best 630 quotes of Blaise Pascal on MyQuotes

According to the doctrine of chance, you ought to put yourself to the trouble of searching for the truth; for if you die without worshiping the True Cause, you are lost. "But," say you, "if He had wished me to worship Him, He would have left me signs of His will." He has done so; but you neglect them. Seek them, therefore; it is well worth it.

Admiration spoils all from infancy.

A few rules include all that is necessary for the perfection of the definitions, the axioms, and the demonstrations, and consequently of the entire method of the geometrical proofs of the art of persuading.

A jester, a bad character.

A little thing comforts us because a little thing afflicts us.

All err the more dangerously because each follows a truth. Their mistake lies not in following a falsehood but in not following another truth.

All evil stems from this-that we do. Know how to handle your solitude.

All great amusements are dangerous to the Christian life; but among all those which the world has invented there is none more to be feared than the theater. It is a representation of the passions so natural and so delicate that it excites them and gives birth to them in our hearts, and, above all, to that of love.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room.

All is one, all is different. How many natures exist in man? How many vocations? And by what chance does each man ordinarily choose what he has heard praised?

All mankind's troubles are caused by one single thing, which is their inability to sit quietly.

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

All man's troubles come from not knowing how to sit still in one room.

All men are almost led to believe not of proof, but by attraction. This way is base, ignoble, and irrelevant; every one therefore disavows it. Each one professes to believe and even to love nothing but what he knows to be worthy of belief and love.

All men have happiness as their object: there is no exception. However different the means they employ, they all aim at the same end.

All men naturally hate each other. We have used concupiscence as best we can to make it serve the common good, but this is mere sham and a false image of charity, for essentially it is just hate.

All men naturally hate one another. I hold it a fact, that if men knew exactly what one says of the other, there would not be four friends in the world.

All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

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

All our dignity lies in our thoughts.

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.

All our troubles come from not being able to be alone.

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

All that tends not to charity is figurative. The sole aim of the Scripture is charity.

All the dignity of man consists in thought. Thought is therefore by its nature a wonderful and incomparable thing. It must have strange defects to be contemptible. But it has such, so that nothing is more ridiculous. How great it is in its nature! How vile it is in its defects! But what is this thought? How foolish it is!

All the excesses, all the violence, and all the vanity of great men, come from the fact that they know not what they are: it being difficult for those who regard themselves at heart as equal with all men... For this it is necessary for one to forget himself, and to believe that he has some real excellence above them, in which consists this illusion that I am endeavoring to discover to you.

All the good maxims which are in the world fail when applied to one's self.

All the miseries of mankind come from one thing, not knowing how to remain alone.

All the troubles of life come upon us because we refuse to sit quietly for a while each day in our rooms.

All the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.

All this visible world is but an imperceptible point in the ample bosom of nature.

All who say the same things do not possess them in the same manner; and hence the incomparable author of the Art of Conversation pauses with so much care to make it understood that we must not judge of the capacity of a man by the excellence of a happy remark that we heard him make. Let us penetrate, says he, the mind from which it proceeds. It will oftenest be seen that he will be made to disavow it on the spot, and will be drawn very far from this better thought in which he does not believe, to plunge himself into another, quite base and ridiculous.

A man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once.

A mere trifle consoles us, for a mere trifle distresses us.

And is it not obvious that, just as it is a crime to disturb the peace when truth reigns, it is also a crime to remain at peace when the truth is being destroyed?

Anyone who does not see the vanity of the world is very vain himself. So who does not see it, apart from young people whose lives are all noise, diversions, and thoughts for the future? But take away their diversion and you will see them bored to extinction. Then they feel their nullity without recognizing it, for nothing could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion.

Anyone who found the secret of rejoicing when things go well without being annoyed when they go badly would have found the point.

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

Apart from Jesus Christ, we do not know what is our life, nor our death, nor God, nor ourselves.

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.

As we speak of poetical beauty, so ought we to speak of mathematical beauty and medical beauty. But we do not do so; and that reason is that we know well what is the object of mathematics, and that it consists in proofs, and what is the object of medicine, and that it consists in healing. But we do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry.

Atheism shows strength of mind, but only to a certain degree.

A town, a landscape are when seen from afar a town and a landscape; but as one gets nearer, there are houses, trees, tiles leaves, grasses, ants, legs of ants and so on to infinity. All this is subsumed under the name of landscape.

At the centre of every human being is a God-shaped vacuum which can only be filled by Jesus Christ.

Beauty is a harmonious relation between something in our nature and the quality of the object which delights us.

Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things.

Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.

Between us, and Hell or Heaven, there is only life between the two, which is the most fragile thing in the world. Variant: Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.

Bless yourself with holy water, have Masses said, and so on; by a simple and natural process this will make you believe, and will dull you - will quiet your proudly critical intellect.

Brave deeds are wasted when hidden.