"It is not our task to secure the triumph of truth, but merely to fight on its behalf."
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Blaise Pascal quotes (page 31 of 37)
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"On the occasions when I have pondered over men's various activities, the dangers and worries they are exposed to at Court or at war, from which so many quarrels, passions, risky, often ill-conceived actions and so on are born, I have often said that man's unhappiness springs from one thing alone, his incapacity to stay quietly in one room."
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"We have an idea of truth, invincible to all scepticism."
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"Without [diversion] we would be in a state of weariness, and this weariness would spur us on to seek a more solid means of escaping from it. But diversion amuses us, and leads us unconsciously to death."
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"The state of man is inconstancy, ennui, anxiety."
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"...for the truth is always older than all the opinions men have held regarding it; and one should be ignoring the nature of truth if we imagined that the truth began at the time it came to be known."
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"The world is ruled by force, not by opinion; but opinion uses force."
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"Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars. I will not forget thy word. Amen."
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"Who knows if this other half of life where we think we're awake is not another sleep a little different from the first."
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"All evil stems from this-that we do. Know how to handle your solitude."
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"The Christian's God does not merely consist of a God who is the Author of mathematical truths and the order of the elements. The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of the Christians, is a God of love and consolation."
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"We desire truth, and find within ourselves only uncertainty. We seek happiness, and find only misery and death. We cannot but desire truth and happiness, and are incapable of certainty or happiness."
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"Something incomprehensible is not for that reason less real."
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"The truth about nature we discover with our brains. The truth about religion we discover with our hearts."
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"It is not shameful for a man to succumb to pain and it is shameful to succumb to pleasure."
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"The mind must not be forced; artificial and constrained manners fill it with foolish presumption, through unnatural elevation and vain and ridiculous inflation, instead of solid and vigorous nutriment."
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"The secrets of nature are concealed; her agency is perpetual, but we do not always discover its effects; time reveals them from age to age; and although she is always the same in herself, she is not always equally well known."
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"I would inquire of reasonable persons whether this principle: Matter is naturally wholly incapable of thought, and this other: I think, therefore I am, are in fact the same in the mind of Descartes, and in that of St. Augustine, who said the same thing twelve hundred years before."
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"We must know where to doubt, where to feel certain, where to submit. He who does not do so, understands not the force of reason."
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"Nothing is so conformable to reason as to disavow reason."
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