"Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed."
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Blaise Pascal quotes (page 4 of 37)
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"Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it."
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"Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light is throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so."
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"We are not satisfied with real life; we want to live some imaginary life in the eyes of other people and to seem different from what we actually are."
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"If god does not exist, one loses nothing by believing in him anyway, while if he does exist, one stands to lose everything by not believing."
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"Man is obviously made for thinking. Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought."
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"You always admire what you really don't understand."
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"It is dangerous to explain too clearly to man how like he is to the animals without pointing out his greatness. It is also dangerous to make too much of his greatness without his vileness. It is still more dangerous to leave him in ignorance of both, but it is most valuable to represent both to him. Man must not be allowed to believe that he is equal either to animals or to angels, nor to be unaware of either, but he must know both."
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"We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves."
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"Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical."
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"Mankind suffers from two excesses: to exclude reason, and to live by nothing but reason."
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"There is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition"
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"Chess is the gymnasium of the mind."
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"The Christian religion teaches me two points-that there is a God whom men can know, and that their nature is so corrupt that they are unworthy of Him."
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"Let man reawake and consider what he is compared with the reality of things; regard himself lost in this remote corner of Nature; and from the tiny cell where he lodges, to wit the Universe, weigh at their true worth earth, kingdoms, towns, himself. What is a man face to face with infinity?"
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"We know that there is an infinite, and we know not its nature. As we know it to be false that numbers are finite, it is therefore true that there is a numerical infinity. But we know not of what kind; it is untrue that it is even, untrue that it is odd; for the addition of a unit does not change its nature; yet it is a number, and every number is odd or even (this certainly holds of every finite number). Thus we may quite well know that there is a God without knowing what He is."
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"Unless we love the truth we cannot know it."
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"Jesus is the God whom we can approach without pride and before whom we can humble ourselves without despair."
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"The greatest single distinguishing feature of the omnipotence of God is that our imagination gets lost thinking about it."
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"Plurality which is not reduced to unity is confusion; unity which does not depend on plurality is tyranny."
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