Quotes from Blaise Pascal

Two things control man's nature: instinct and experience.

Lust and force are the source of all our actions; lust causes voluntary actions, force involuntary ones.

The power of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special efforts, but by his ordinary doing.

If you want people to think well of you, do not speak well of yourself.

Great and small suffer the same mishaps.

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.

The last advance of reason is to recognize that it is surpassed by innumerable things; it is feeble if it cannot realize that.

All our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.

All men have happiness as their object: there is no exception. However different the means they employ, they aim at the same end.

As we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.

All mankind's unhappiness derives from one thing: his inability to know how to remain in repose in one room.

Let it not be said that I have said nothing new. The arrangement of the material is new.

I have only made this letter rather long because I have not had time to make it shorter.

There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.

There are two kinds of people one can call reasonable: those who serve God with all their heart because they know him, and those who seek him with all their heart because they do not know him.

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

The war existing between the senses and reason.

Civil wars are the greatest of evils. They are inevitable, if we wish to reward merit, for all will say that they are meritorious.

We must learn our limits. We are all something, but none of us are everything.

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 know truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart.

Wisdom leads us back to childhood.

The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.

The married should not forget that to speak of love begets love.