Quotes from Blaise Pascal

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

172] The way of God, who disposes all things with gentleness, is to instil religion into our minds with reasoned arguments and into our hearts with grace, but attempting to instil it into hearts and minds with force and threats is to instil not religion but terror. Terror rather than religion. (185)

So imprudent are we that we wander in the times which are nor ours, and do not think of the only one which belongs to us; and so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no more, and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists.

They would do better to say: Our book, Our commentary, Our history, etc., because there is in them usually more of other people's than their own.

Ainsi s'écoule toute la vie ; on cherche le repos en combattant quelques obstacles et si on les a surmontés le repos devient insupportable par l'ennui qu'il engendre. Il en faut sortir et mendier le tumulte.

172] The way of God, who disposes all things with gentleness, is to instil religion into our minds with reasoned arguments and into our hearts with grace, but attempting to instil it into hearts and minds with force and threats is to instil not religion but terror. Terror rather than religion.

What people want is not the easy peaceful life that allows us to think of our unhappy condition, nor the dangers of war, nor the burdens of office, but the agitation that takes our mind off it and diverts us. That is why we prefer the hunt to the capture.

The last thing we discover in composing a work is what to put down first.

Nothing is so defective as those laws which correct defects.

Let no one say that I have said nothing new; the arrangement of the material is new. In playing tennis both players use the same ball, but one plays it better. I would just as soon be told that I have used old words. As if the same thoughts did not form a different argument by being differently arranged, just as the same words make different thoughts when arranged differently!

Any man can do what Mahomet did. For he preformed miracles and was not foretold. No man can do what Christ did.

The Jesuits have tried to combine God and the world, and have only earned the contempt of God and the world.

Let them at least learn what is the religion they attack, before attacking it. If this religion boasted of having a clear view of God, and of possessing it open and unveiled, it would be attacking it to say that we see nothing in the world which shows it with this clearness. But since, on the contrary, it says that men are

Merely according to reason, nothing is just in itself, everything shifts with time. Custom is the whole of equity for the sole reason that it is accepted.

you would like to cure yourself of unbelief and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc. Even this will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness.

The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. They throw earth over your head and it is finished forever.

Nothing is so conformable to reason as to disavow reason.

71 Too much and too little wine. Give him none, he cannot find truth; give him too much, the same.

Hence it comes that men so much love noise and stir; hence it comes that the prison is so horrible a punishment; hence it comes that the pleasure of solitude is a thing incomprehensible. And it is in fact the greatest source of happiness in the condition of kings, that men try incessantly to divert them, and to procure for them all kinds of pleasures.

The virtue of a man ought to be measured not by his extraordinary exertions, but by his every-day conduct.

Man is so made that if he is told often enough that he is a fool he believes it.

Thus men who are naturally conscious of what they are shun nothing, so much as rest; they would do anything to be disturbed.

22] Flies are so mighty that they win battles, paralyse our minds, eat up our bodies.

Reverend Fathers, my letters do not customarily follow one another so closely, nor are they usually so extensive. The little time I have had has caused both. I have made this one longer only because I have not had the leisure of making it shorter.