Blaise Pascal

 French - Philosopher June 19, 1623 - August 19, 1662

I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.

Blaise Pascal

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
Blaise Pascal

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

Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much.
Blaise Pascal

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.
Blaise Pascal

Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.
Blaise Pascal

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't.
Blaise Pascal

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.
Blaise Pascal

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

Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.
Blaise Pascal

Noble deeds that are concealed are most esteemed.
Blaise Pascal

We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.
Blaise Pascal

Man's greatness lies in his power of thought.
Blaise Pascal

You always admire what you really don't understand.
Blaise Pascal

Love has reasons which reason cannot understand.
Blaise Pascal

Human beings must be known to be loved; but Divine beings must be loved to be known.
Blaise Pascal

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

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

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.
Blaise Pascal

I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
Blaise Pascal

If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.
Blaise Pascal

There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.
Blaise Pascal

Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.
Blaise Pascal

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

Faith is different from proof; the latter is human, the former is a Gift from God.
Blaise Pascal

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.
Blaise Pascal

We know the truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart.
Blaise Pascal

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.
Blaise Pascal

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this 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 strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts.
Blaise Pascal

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.
Blaise Pascal

It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.
Blaise Pascal

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.
Blaise Pascal

Jesus is the God whom we can approach without pride and before whom we can humble ourselves without despair.
Blaise Pascal

If all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.
Blaise Pascal

It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.
Blaise Pascal

People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered themselves than by those found by others.
Blaise Pascal

The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.
Blaise Pascal

Little things console us because little things afflict us.
Blaise Pascal

When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before.
Blaise Pascal

Do you wish people to think well of you? Don't speak well of yourself.
Blaise Pascal

The last act is bloody, however pleasant all the rest of the play is: a little earth is thrown at last upon our head, and that is the end forever.
Blaise Pascal

Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.
Blaise Pascal

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarreled with him?
Blaise Pascal

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come in to the mind of others.
Blaise Pascal

Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.
Blaise Pascal

There are two kinds of people one can call reasonable: those who serve God with all their heart because they know him, and those who seek him with all their heart because they do not know him.
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.
Blaise Pascal

Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness... and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him.
Blaise Pascal

Happiness is neither without us nor within us. It is in God, both without us and within us.
Blaise Pascal

We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike.
Blaise Pascal

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.
Blaise Pascal

Law, without force, is impotent.
Blaise Pascal

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

Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.
Blaise Pascal

The struggle alone pleases us, not the victory.
Blaise Pascal

It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.
Blaise Pascal

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.
Blaise Pascal

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

A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.
Blaise Pascal