Quotes from Blaise Pascal

We must keep our thought secret, and judge everything by it, while talking like the people.

For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.

Man's sensitivity to little things and insensitivity to the greatest things are marks of a strange disorder.

Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't.

The power of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special efforts, but by his ordinary doing.

Man's grandeur is that he knows himself to be miserable.

There is a certain standard of grace and beauty which consists in a certain relation between our nature... and the thing which pleases us.

The only thing that consoles us for our miseries is diversion. And yet it is the greatest of our miseries. For it is that above all which prevents us thinking about ourselves and leads is imperceptibly to destruction. But for that we should be bored, and boredom would drive us to seek some more solid means of escape, but diversion passes our time and brings us imperceptibly to our death.

If they [Plato and Aristotle] wrote about politics it was as if to lay down rules for a madhouse. And if they pretended to treat it as something really important it was because they knew that the madmen they were talking to believed themselves to be kings and emperors. They humoured these beliefs in order to calm down their madness with as little harm as possible.

The weather and my mood have little connection. I have my foggy and my fine days within me; my prosperity or misfortune has little to do with the matter.

When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing.

Words differently arranged have different meanings, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room.

Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without a passion, without business, without entertainment, without care.

A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.

Just as I do not know where I came from, so I do not know where I am going. All I know is that when I leave this world I shall fall forever into oblivion, or into the hands of an angry God, without knowing which of the two will be my lot for eternity. Such is my state of mind, full of weakness and uncertainty. The only conclusion I can draw from all this is that I must pass my days without a thought of trying to find out what is going to happen to me.

The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play

When a soldier complains of his hard life (or a labourer, etc.) try giving him nothing to do.

No religion except ours has taught that man is born in sin; none of the philosophical sects has admitted it; none therefore has spoken the truth

Please forgive the long letter; I didn't have time to write a short one.

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

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

Unless we know ourselves to be full of pride, ambition, concupiscence, weakness, wretchedness and unrighteousness, we are truly blind. And if someone knows all this and does not desire to be saved, what can be said of him?