Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

Quotes

• We know truth, not only by reason, but also by the heart.

• Let us weigh the gain and the loss, in wagering that God is. Consider these alternatives: if you win, you win all, if you lose you lose nothing. Do not hesitate, then, to wager that he is.

• 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.

• When I consider the small span of my life absorbed in the eternity of all time, or the small part of space which I can touch or see engulfed by the infinite immensity of spaces that I know not and that know me not, I am frightened and astonished to see myself here instead of there... now instead of then.

• If all men knew what each said of the other, there would not be four friends in the world.

• Truth is so obscure in these times and falsehood so established that unless one loves the truth, he cannot know it.

• People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered themselves than by those found by others.

• Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.

• Our notion of symmetry is derived from the human face. Hence, we demand symmetry horizontally and in breath only, not vertically nor in depth.

• Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism.

• I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.

• 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.

• The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.

• Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

• We think very little of time present; we anticipate the future, as being too slow, and with a view to hasten it onward, we recall the past to stay it as too swiftly gone. We are so thoughtless, that we thus wander through the hours which are not here, regardless only of the moment that is actually our own.

• By a peculiar prerogative, not only each individual is making daily advances in the sciences, and may makes advances in morality, but all mankind together are making a continual progress in proportion as the universe grows older; so that the whole human race, during the course of so many ages, may be considered as one man, who never ceases to live and learn.

• 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 is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.

• Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being.

• Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.