Quotes from Blaise Pascal

We like security: we like the pope to be infallible in matters of faith, and grave doctors to be so in moral questions so that we can feel reassured.

Faith is a sounder guide than reason. Reason can go only so far but faith has no limits.

It is the heart which experiences God and not the reason.

Faith declares what the senses do not see but not the contrary of what they see.

You always admire what you really dont understand.

Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much.

We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves; we desire to live an imaginary life in the minds of others, and for this purpose we endeavor to shine.

Let it not be imagined that the life of a good Christian must be a life of melancholy and gloominess; for he only resigns some pleasures to enjoy others infinitely better.

We are not satisfied with real life; we want to live some imaginary life in the eyes of other people and to seem different from what we actually are.

Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.

We are usually convinced more easily by reasons we have found ourselves than by those which have occurred to others.

If we all told what we know of one another there would not be four friends in the world

Live free or die

So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleepi

It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.

The past and present are only our means; the future is always our end. Thus we never really live, but only hope to live.

If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.

The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of.

To find recreation in amusement is not happiness.

Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. Love still stands when all else has fallen.

We never, then, love a person, but only qualities

We conceal it from ourselves in vain - we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.

The heart has reasons that reason cannot know.