Quotes from Blaise Pascal

What do the prophets say about Jesus Christ? That he will plainly be God? No, but that he is a truly hidden God, that he will not be recognized, that people will not believe that it is he, that he will be a stumbling-block on which many will fall

Noble deeds are most estimable when hidden.

La vanité est si ancrée dans le cÅ"ur de l'homme qu'un soldat, un goujat, un cuisinier, un crocheteur se vante et veut avoir ses admirateurs ; et les philosophes mêmes en veulent. Et ceux qui écrivent contre veulent avoir la gloire d'avoir bien écrit ; et ceux qui lisent veulent avoir la gloire de l'avoir lu ; et moi qui écris ceci, ai peut-être cette envie ».

This religion taught its children what men had managed to know only at their most enlightened.

Notre durée vaine et chétive

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

There are only two kinds of men: righteous men who believe themselves sinners; the rest, sinners, who believe themselves righteous - Pascal

We do not choose as captain of a ship the most highly born of those aboard.

God wishes to move the will rather than the mind. Perfect clarity would help the mind and harm the will. Humble their pride.

There is enough light to enlighten the elect and enough obscurity to humiliate them. There is enough obscurity to blind the reprobate and enough light to condemn them and deprive them of excuse.

Justice is subject to dispute; might is easily recognized and is not disputed. So we cannot give might to justice.

A trifle consoles us because a trifle upsets us.

How I hate these follies of not believing in the Eucharist, &c.! If the Gospel be true, if Jesus Christ be God, what difficulty is there?

God being thus hidden, any religion that does not say that God is hidden is not true, and any religion which does not explain why does not instruct. Ours does all thus. Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself.1

The last thing one settles in writing a book is what one should put in first.

that the closed mem6 signified 600 years. But the time was foretold clearly, while the manner was figurative.

The brutes do not admire each other. A horse does not admire his companion. Not that there is no rivalry between them in a race, but that is of no consequence; for, when in the stable, the heaviest and most ill-formed does not give up his oats to another as men would have others do to them. Their virtue is satisfied with itself.

Love or hate alters the face of justice.

One must know when it is right to doubt, to affirm, to submit. Anyone who does otherwise does not understand the force of reason. Some men run counter to these three principles, either affirming that everything can be proved, because they know nothing about proof, or doubting everything, because they do not know when to submit, or always submitting, because they do not know when judgment is called for.

The strength of a man's virtue must not be measured by his efforts, but by his ordinary life.

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.

Rivers are roads which move, [8] and which carry us whither we desire to go.

Two excesses: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason.

11 All great amusements are dangerous to the Christian life; but among all those which the world has invented there is none more to be feared than the theatre. It is a representation of the passions so natural and so delicate that it excites them and gives birth to them in our hearts, and, above all, to that of love, principally when it is represented as very chaste and virtuous. For the more innocent it appears to innocent souls, the more they are likely to be touched by it.