All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling. - Blaise Pascal

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

All men naturally hate one another. They employ lust as far as possible in the service of the public weal. But this is only a pretence and a false image of love; for at bottom it is only hate.

Why should I choose to divide my ethics into four rather than six? Why should I define virtue as four, or two, or one? Why as desist and resist rather than 'follow nature' or 'discharge your private business without injustice', like Plato, or anything else?
'But,' you will say, 'there everything is summed up in a word. - 'Yes, but that is no good unless you explain it.' And when you come to explain it, as soon as you open up this precept which contains all the others, out they all come in the original confusion that you wanted to avoid. Thus when they are all enclosed in one they are concealed and useless, as if they were in a box, and they only come to light in their natural confusion. Nature has laid them down, without enclosing one inside another.