"To call a king "Prince" is pleasing, because it diminishes his rank."
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Quote collection
Blaise Pascal quotes (page 34 of 37)
727 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Since [man] is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the nothing from which he was made, and the infinite in which he is swallowed up."
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"That a religion may be true, it must have knowledge of our nature."
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"What matters it that man should have a little more knowledge of the universe? If he has it, he gets little higher. Is he not always infinitely removed from the end, and is not the duration of our life equally removed from eternity, even if it lasts ten years longer?"
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"Notwithstanding the sight of all our miseries, which press upon us and take us by the throat, we have an instinct which we cannot repress, and which lifts us up."
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"All this visible world is but an imperceptible point in the ample bosom of nature."
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"To scorn philosophy is truly to philosophize."
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"Therefore, those to whom God has imparted religion by intuition are very fortunate and justly convinced. But to those who do not have it, we can give it only by reasoning, waiting for God to give them spiritual insight, without which faith is only human and useless for salvation."
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"A few rules include all that is necessary for the perfection of the definitions, the axioms, and the demonstrations, and consequently of the entire method of the geometrical proofs of the art of persuading."
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"Rivers are highways that move on and bear us whither we wish to go."
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"What a chimaera then is man, what a novelty, what a monster, what chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, yet an imbecile earthworm; depository of truth, yet a sewer of uncertainty and error; pride and refuse of the universe. Who shall resolve this tangle?"
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"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."
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"An advocate who has been well paid in advance will find the cause he is pleading all the more just."
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"We are never in search of things, but always in search of the search."
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"Discourses on humility are a source of pride in the vain and of humility in the humble. So those on scepticism cause believers to affirm. Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, few doubtingly of scepticism."
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"How comes it that a cripple does not offend us, but a fool does? Because a cripple recognizes that we walk straight, whereas a fool declares that it is we who are silly; if it were not so, we should feel pity and not anger."
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"Our true dignity consists — in thought. Thence we must derive our elevation, not from space or duration. Let us endeavor then to think well; this is the principle of morals."
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"Notre nature est dans le mouvement; le repos entier est la mort. Our nature consists in movement; absolute rest is death."
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"Meanings receive their dignity from words instead of giving it to them."
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"Man's greatness is great in that he knows himself wretched. A tree does not know itself wretched. It is then being wretched to know oneself wretched; but it is being great to know that one is wretched."
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