959 Quotes by Blaise Pascal

All the maxims have been written. It only remains to put them into practice.

No one is ignorant that there are two avenues by which opinions are received into the soul, which are its two principal powers: the understanding and the will.

Those who profess contempt for men, and put them on a level with beasts, yet wish to be admired and believed by men, and contradict themselves by their own feelings--their nature, which is stronger than all, convincing them of the greatness of man more forcibly than reason convinces them of his baseness.

The origins of disputes between philosophers is, that one class of them have undertaken to raise man by displaying his greatness, and the other to debase him by showing his miseries.

Il y a deux sortes d'esprits, l'un ge ome trique, et l'autre que l'on peut appeler de finesse. Le premier a des vues lentes, dures et inflexibles; mais le dernier a une souplesse de pense e. There are two kinds of mind, one mathematical, the other what one might call the intuitive. The first takes a slow, firm, inflexible view, but the latter has flexibility of thought.

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.

God only pours out his light into the mind after having subdued the rebellion of the will by an altogether heavenly gentleness which charms and wins it.

We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart. It is through the latter that we know first principles, and reason, which has nothing to do with it, tries in vain to refute them.

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.