Blaise Pascal Quotes

The world is a good judge of things, for it is in natural ignorance, which is man's true state. The sciences have two extremes which meet. The first is the pure natural ignorance in which all men find themselves at birth. The other extreme is that reached by great intellects, who, having run through all that men can know, find they know nothing, and come back again to that same ignorance from which they set out; but this is a learned ignorance which is conscious of itself. Those between the two, who have departed from natural ignorance and not been able to reach the other, have some smattering of this vain knowledge and pretend to be wise. These trouble the world and are bad judges of everything. The people and the wise constitute the world; these despise it, and are despised. They judge badly of everything, and the world judges rightly of them.

Voilà notre état véritable. C'est ce qui resserre nos connaissances en de certaines bornes que nous ne pas sons pas, incapables de savoir tout, et d'ignorer tout absolument.

Reason never wholly overcomes imagination, while the contrary is quite common.

Man’s greatness come from knowing he wretched: a tree does not know it is wretched. (21)

The eternal silence of these infinite places fills me with dread.

We desire truth and find in ourselves nothing but uncertainty.
We seek happiness and find only wretchedness and death.
We are incapable of not desiring truth and happiness and incapable of either certainty or happiness.
We have been left with this desire as much as a punishment as to make us feel how far we have fallen.

Man is neither angel nor beast, and it is unfortunately the case that anyone trying to act the angel acts the beast.

The word ‘enemy’ is therefore ambiguous, but if he says elsewhere, as he does, that he will deliver his people from their sins,1 as do Isaiah2 and others, the ambiguity is removed, and the double meaning of enemies reduced to the single meaning of iniquities.

The heart has its reasons which reason knoweth not.

When we want to correct someone usefully and show him he is wrong, we must see from what point of view he is approaching the matter, for it is usually right from that point of view, and we must admit this, but show him the point of view from which it is wrong. This will please him, because he will see that he was not wrong but merely failed to see every aspect of the question. Now, no one is annoyed at not seeing everything, but no one wants to be wrong; the reason for that may be that man is not by nature able to see everything, and by nature cannot be wrong from the point of view he adopts, as sense impressions are always true.

There is nothing so consistent with reason as this denial of reason.

One, knowing the duties of man and being ignorant of his impotence, is lost in presumption, and that the other, knowing the impotence and being ignorant of the duty, falls into laxity; whence it seems that since the one leads to truth, the other to error, there would be formed from their alliance a perfect system of morals. But instead of this peace, nothing but war and a general ruin would result from their union; for the one establishing certainty, the other doubt, the one the greatness of man, the other his weakness, they would destroy the truths as well as the falsehoods of each other. So that they cannot subsist alone because of their defects, nor unite because of their opposition, and thus they break and destroy each other to give place to the truth of the Gospel. This it is that harmonizes the contrarieties by a wholly divine act, and uniting all that is true and expelling all that is false, thus makes of them a truly celestial wisdom in which those opposites accord that were incompatible in human doctrines.

Chess is the gymnasium of the mind

Five [of the above] rules are of absolute necessity, and cannot be dispensed with without essential defect and often without error.

If the foot had never realized it belonged to the body, & that there never was a body on which it depended, if it had only known & loved itself & then came to know that it really belonged to the body on which it depended, think of the regret & shame it would feel for its past existence. It would recognize how useless it had been to the body in spite of the life poured into it, & how it would have been destroyed if the body had rejected it & cut it off as the foot cut itself off from the body! How it would have desired earnestly to be kept on! How obediently it would let itself be governed by the will in charge of the body, to the point of being amputated if necessary! Otherwise it would cease to a member, for every member must be ready to perish for the sake of the whole, for whose sake alone exists.