Quotes from Blaise Pascal

Man's grandeur is that he knows himself to be miserable.

Description of man: dependence, longing for independence, need.

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

All men naturally hate one another. I hold it a fact, that if men knew exactly what one says of the other, there would not be four friends in the world.

Quelque e tendue d'esprit que l'on ait, l'on n'est capable que d'une grande passion. However vast a man's spirit, he is only capable of one great passion.

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

Is it courage in a dying man to go, in weakness and in agony, to affront an almighty and eternal God?

Those who make antitheses by forcing the sense are like men who make false windows for the sake of symmetry. Their rule is not to speak justly, but to make accurate figures.

The more intelligence one has, the more people one finds original. Commonplace people see no difference between men.

Through space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; through thought I comprehend the world.

The only shame is to have none.

The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.

It is the fight alone that please us, not the victory.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room.

"When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before."

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

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

All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.

I cannot judge my work while I am doing it. I have to do as painters do, stand back and view it from a distance, but not too great a distance. How great? Guess.

La dernie' re chose qu'on trouve en faisant un ouvrage, est de savoir celle qu'il faut mettre la premie' re. The last thing one discovers in composing a work iswhat to put first.

Atheism shows strength of mind, but only to a certain degree.

We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves.

The art of subversion, of revolution, is to dislodge established customs by probing down to their origins in order to show how they lack authority and justice.

If magistrates had true justice, and if physicians had the true art of healing, they would have no occasion for square caps; the majesty of these sciences would itself be venerable enough.