Blaise Pascal Quotes

People often mistake their imagination for their heart, & so often are convinced they are converted as soon as they start thinking of becoming converted.

For after all, what is man in creation? Is he not a mere cipher compared with the infinite, a whole compared to the nothing, a mean between zero & all, infinitely remote from understanding of either extreme? Who can follow these astonishing processes? The Author of these wonders understands them, but no one else can.

I make no doubt... that these rules are simple, artless, and natural.

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

Rules necessary for axioms. Not to demand in axioms any but things perfectly evident.

To tell the truth is useful to those to whom it is spoken, but disadvantageous to those who tell it, because it makes them disliked.

If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then, without hesitation, that He exsists.

Do not imagine that it is less an accident by which you find yourself master of the wealth which you possess, than that by which this man found himself king.

When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.

Let us then take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the Nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the Infinite. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature.

Nothing is so defective as those laws which correct defects.

Ci Puo' essere quakcosa di piu' stupido del fatto che un uomo abbia il diritto di uccidermi perche' vive sull'altra sponda di un fiume e il suo sovrano ha avuto una lite con il mio, anche se io non ho litigato con lui?

Everything that is written merely to please the author is worthless.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

It is superstitious to put one's hope in formalities, but arrogant to refuse to submit to them.