Blaise Pascal Quotes

We make an idol of truth itself, for truth apart from charity is not God, but his image and an idol that we must not love or worship.

God instituted prayer to communicate to creatures the dignity of causality.

Man is neither angel nor beast, and unhappily whoever wants to act the angel, acts the beast.

Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions.

We run carelessly over the precipice after having put something in front of us to prevent us seeing it.

Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars. I will not forget thy word. Amen.

Jesus is a God whom we can approach without pride and before whom we can humble ourselves without despair.

He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God's providence to lead him aright

Kind words do not cost much. They never blister the tongue or lips. They make other people good-natured. They also produce their own image on men's souls, and a beautiful image it is.

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.

The heart has its order, the mind has its own, which uses principles and demonstrations. The heart has a different one. We do not prove that we ought to be loved by setting out in order the causes of love; that would be absurd.

If he exalts himself, I humble him.
If he humbles himself, I exalt him.
And I go on contradicting him
Until he understands
That he is a monster that passes all understanding.

The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of.

Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.

We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is the present usually hurts.