Quotes from Blaise Pascal

There is a God-shaped vacuum in every heart.

Justice and truth are too such subtle points that our tools are too blunt to touch them accurately.

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

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

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

Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.

Vanity is so secure in the heart of man that everyone wants to be admired: even I who write this, and you who read this.

The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.

"God is, or He is not." But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager?… If you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.

Man's true nature being lost, everything becomes his nature as, his true good being lost, everything becomes his good.

Men often take their imagination for their heart and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.

That we must love one God only is a thing so evident that it does not require miracles to prove it.

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

Evil is easy, and has infinite forms.

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.

Men blaspheme what they do not know.

If all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.

"The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob," not of philosophers and scholars.

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

It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist.

Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves.

What is man in nature? Nothing in relation to the infinite, everything in relation to nothing, a mean between nothing and everything.

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!

All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.