Quotes from Blaise Pascal

Kind words do not cost much. They never blister the tongue or lips. They make other people good-natured. They also produce their own image on men's souls, and a beautiful image it is.

What a chimera then is man. What a novelty! What a monster... what a contradiction, what a prodigy

Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without a passion, without business, without entertainment, without care.

Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.

Man is obviously made for thinking. Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought.

The Christian religion teaches me two points-that there is a God whom men can know, and that their nature is so corrupt that they are unworthy of Him.

There is a God-shaped hole in the life of every man.

All the trouble in the world is due to the fact that man cannot sit still in a room.

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

Jesus Christ came to tell men that they have no enemies but themselves.

The more intelligent a man is, the more originality he discovers in others.

All sorrow has its root in man's inability to sit quiet in a room by himself.

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!

If a man is not made for God, why is he happy only in God?

To make a man a saint, it must indeed be by grace; and whoever doubts this does not know what a saint is, or a man.

Man lives between the infinitely large and the infinitely small.

The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.

As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.

The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.

A man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once.

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.

Those who are clever in imagination are far more pleased with themselves than prudent men could reasonably be.

All the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.

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