Quotes By Blaise Pascal

Happiness is neither without us nor within us. It is in God, both without us and within us.

The gospel to me is simply irresistible.

If we must not act save on a certainty, we ought not to act on religion, for it is not certain. But how many things we do on an uncertainty, sea voyages, battles!

The knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him.

Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.

We never love a person, but only qualities.

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?

Reason commands us far more imperiously than a master; for in disobeying the one we are unfortunate, and in disobeying the other we are fools.

We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.

Faith is different from proof; the latter is human, the former is a Gift from God.

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come in to the mind of others.

Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

The sensitivity of men to small matters, and their indifference to great ones, indicates a strange inversion.

If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.

Atheism shows strength of mind, but only to a certain degree.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

The strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts.

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

We conceal it from ourselves in vain - we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.

Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.

The self is hateful.

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?

It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

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

In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.

Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.

It is good to be tired and wearied by the futile search after the true good, that we may stretch out our arms to the Redeemer.