All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.
– 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
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 quarrelled with him?
– Blaise Pascal
Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.
– Blaise Pascal
Desire and force between them are responsible for all our actions; desire causes our voluntary acts, force our involuntary.
– Blaise Pascal
Do you wish people to think well of you? Don't speak well of yourself.
– Blaise Pascal
Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason.
– Blaise Pascal
Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.
– Blaise Pascal
Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.
– Blaise Pascal
Evil is easy, and has infinite forms.
– Blaise Pascal
Faith embraces many truths which seem to contradict each other.
– Blaise Pascal
Faith is different from proof; the latter is human, the former is a Gift from God.
– Blaise Pascal
Few friendships would survive if each one knew what his friend says of him behind his back.
– Blaise Pascal
Had Cleopatra's nose been shorter, the whole face of the world would have changed.
– Blaise Pascal
If all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.
– Blaise Pascal
If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.
– Blaise Pascal
Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.
– Blaise Pascal
In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.
– 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
It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.
– 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
Jesus is the God whom we can approach without pride and before whom we can humble ourselves without despair.
– Blaise Pascal
Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.
– Blaise Pascal
Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much.
– Blaise Pascal
Law, without force, is impotent.
– Blaise Pascal
Love has reasons which reason cannot understand.
– Blaise Pascal
Man's greatness lies in his power of thought.
– Blaise Pascal
Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.
– Blaise Pascal
Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.
– Blaise Pascal
Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.
– Blaise Pascal
Nothing is as approved as mediocrity, the majority has established it and it fixes it fangs on whatever gets beyond it either way.
– Blaise Pascal
Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without a passion, without business, without entertainment, without care.
– Blaise Pascal
One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.
– Blaise Pascal
People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered themselves than by those found by others.
– Blaise Pascal
Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.
– Blaise Pascal
The charm of fame is so great that we like every object to which it is attached, even death.
– Blaise Pascal
The gospel to me is simply irresistible.
– Blaise Pascal
The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.
– Blaise Pascal
The strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts.
– Blaise Pascal
The struggle alone pleases us, not the victory.
– Blaise Pascal
The war existing between the senses and reason.
– Blaise Pascal
There are only three types of people; those who have found God and serve him; those who have not found God and seek him, and those who live not seeking, or finding him. The first are rational and happy; the second unhappy and rational, and the third foolish and unhappy.
– 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
There are truths on this side of the Pyranees, which are falsehoods on the other.
– 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
Too much and too little wine. Give him none, he cannot find truth; give him too much, the same.
– Blaise Pascal
Two things control men's nature, instinct and experience.
– Blaise Pascal
Vanity is but the surface.
– Blaise Pascal
Vanity of science. Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science.
– Blaise Pascal
We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves.
– Blaise Pascal
We conceal it from ourselves in vain - we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.
– Blaise Pascal
We only consult the ear because the heart is wanting.
– Blaise Pascal
We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.
– Blaise Pascal
We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike.
– Blaise Pascal
When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before.
– Blaise Pascal
When we see a natural style, we are astonished and charmed; for we expected to see an author, and we find a person.
– Blaise Pascal
You always admire what you really don't understand.
– Blaise Pascal
Human beings must be known to be loved; but Divine beings must be loved to be known.
– Blaise Pascal
Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what it loves.
– Blaise Pascal
Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.
– Blaise Pascal
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.
– 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
The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.
– Blaise Pascal
The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.
– Blaise Pascal
We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.
– Blaise Pascal
We arrive at the truth, not by the reason only, but also by the heart.
– Blaise Pascal
We know truth, not only by reason, but also by the heart.
– Blaise Pascal
We like security: we like the pope to be infallible in matters of faith, and grave doctors to be so in moral questions so that we can feel reassured.
– 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
To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.
– 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
There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.
– Blaise Pascal
The sensitivity of men to small matters, and their indifference to great ones, indicates a strange inversion.
– Blaise Pascal
The knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him.
– Blaise Pascal
The immortality of the soul is a matter which is of so great consequence to us and which touches us so profoundly that we must have lost all feeling to be indifferent about it.
– 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
The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.
– Blaise Pascal
The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.
– Blaise Pascal
That we must love one God only is a thing so evident that it does not require miracles to prove it.
– Blaise Pascal
Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.
– Blaise Pascal
Our nature consists in motion complete rest is death.
– Blaise Pascal
Noble deeds that are concealed are most esteemed.
– Blaise Pascal
Men often take their imagination for their heart and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.
– Blaise Pascal
Men blaspheme what they do not know.
– Blaise Pascal
Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.
– Blaise Pascal
Man's true nature being lost, everything becomes his nature as, his true good being lost, everything becomes his good.
– Blaise Pascal
Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.
– 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
Justice and truth are too such subtle points that our tools are too blunt to touch them accurately.
– Blaise Pascal
It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist.
– Blaise Pascal
Imagination decides everything.
– Blaise Pascal
If we must not act save on a certainty, we ought not to act on religion, for it is not certain. But how many things we do on an uncertainty, sea voyages, battles!
– Blaise Pascal
I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
– Blaise Pascal
He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God's providence to lead him aright.
– Blaise Pascal
Happiness is neither without us nor within us. It is in God, both without us and within us.
– 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
Faith indeed tells what the senses do not tell, but not the contrary of what they see. It is above them and not contrary to them.
– Blaise Pascal
Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?
– Blaise Pascal
Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them no art can keep or acquire them.
– Blaise Pascal
Atheism shows strength of mind, but only to a certain degree.