Quotes from Blaise Pascal

Religion is so great a thing that it is right that those who will not take the trouble to seek it if it be obscure, should be deprived of it.

Which is the more believable of the two, Moses or China?

That a religion may be true, it must have knowledge of our nature.

I would have far more fear of being mistaken, and of finding that the Christian religion was true, than of not being mistaken in believing it true.

Who dispenses reputation? Who makes us respect and revere persons, works, laws, the great? Who but this faculty of imagination? All the riches of the earth are inadequate without its approval.

Curiosity is nothing more than vanity. More often than not we only seek knowledge to show it off.

Our own interests are still an exquisite means for dazzling our eyes agreeably.

If I believe in God and life after death and you do not, and if there is no God, we both lose when we die. However, if there is a God, you still lose and I gain everything.

Don't try to add more years to your life. Better add more life to your years.

The consciousness of the falsity of present pleasures, and the ignorance of the vanity of absent pleasures, cause inconstancy.

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

The parts of the universe ... all are connected with each other in such a way that I think it to be impossible to understand any one without the whole.

The sole cause of all human misery is the inability of people to sit quietly in their rooms.

It's not those who write the laws that have the greatest impact on society. It's those who write the songs.

Human life is thus only an endless illusion. Men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does when we are gone. Society is based on mutual hypocrisy.

Apart from Jesus Christ, we do not know what is our life, nor our death, nor God, nor ourselves.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

Love has reasons which reason cannot understand.

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come in to the mind of others.

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?

Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them.

Faith indeed tells what the senses do not tell, but not the contrary of what they see. It is above them and not contrary to them.