Top 500 Blaise Pascal Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “It is not shameful for a man to succumb to pain and it is shameful to succumb to pleasure.”

— Blaise Pascal

152. “Most of man’s trouble comes from his inability to be still.”

— Blaise Pascal

153. “To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize.”

— Blaise Pascal

154. “Reflect on death as in Jesus Christ, not as without Jesus Christ. Without Jesus Christ it is dreadful, it is alarming, it is the terror of nature. In Jesus Christ it is fair and lovely, it is good and holy, it is the joy of saints.”

— Blaise Pascal

155. “We can only know God well when we know our own sin. And those who have known God without knowing their wretchedness have not glorified Him but have glorified themselves.”

— Blaise Pascal

156. “Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.”

— Blaise Pascal

157. “The Fall is an offense to human reason, but once accepted, it makes perfect sense of the human condition.”

— Blaise Pascal

158. “When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before.”

— Blaise Pascal

159. “He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God’s providence to lead him aright.”

— Blaise Pascal

160. “The virtue of a man ought to be measured not by his extraordinary exertions, but by his every-day conduct.”

— Blaise Pascal

161. “Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.”

— Blaise Pascal

162. “Eloquence is a painting of thought; and thus those who, after having painted it, add something more, make a picture instead of a portrait.”

— Blaise Pascal

163. “All our life passes in this way: we seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces.”

— Blaise Pascal

164. “Symmetry is what we see at a glance; based on the fact that there is no reason for any difference...”

— Blaise Pascal

165. “We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.”

— Blaise Pascal

166. “All men naturally hate each other. We have used concupiscence as best we can to make it serve the common good, but this is mere sham and a false image of charity, for essentially it is just hate.”

— Blaise Pascal

167. “Discourses on humility are a source of pride in the vain and of humility in the humble. So those on scepticism cause believers to affirm. Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, few doubtingly of scepticism.”

— Blaise Pascal

168. “What a strange vanity painting is; it attracts admiration by resembling the original, we do not admire.”

— Blaise Pascal

169. “Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things.”

— Blaise Pascal

170. “There are two equally dangerous extremes-to shut reason out, and to let nothing else in.”

— Blaise Pascal

171. “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.”

— Blaise Pascal

172. “All our dignity lies in our thoughts.”

— Blaise Pascal

173. “Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves.”

— Blaise Pascal

174. “We should seek the truth without hesitation; and, if we refuse it, we show that we value the esteem of men more than the search for truth.”

— Blaise Pascal

175. “Put the world’s greatest philosopher on a plank that is wider than need be; if there is a precipe below, although his reason may convince him that he is safe, his imagination will prevail.”

— Blaise Pascal

176. “Imagination cannot make fools wise, but it makes them happy, as against reason, which only makes its friends wretched: one covers them with glory, the other with shame.”

— Blaise Pascal

177. “In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.”

— Blaise Pascal

178. “There is nothing that we can see on earth which does not either show the wretchedness of man or the mercy of God. One either sees the powerlessness of man without God, or the strength of man with God.”

— Blaise Pascal

179. “The multitude which is not brought to act as a unity, is confusion. That unity which has not its origin in the multitude is tyranny.”

— Blaise Pascal

180. “To doubt is a misfortune, but to seek when in doubt is an indispensable duty. So he who doubts and seeks not is at once unfortunate and unfair.”

— Blaise Pascal

181. “How comes it that a cripple does not offend us, but a fool does? Because a cripple recognizes that we walk straight, whereas a fool declares that it is we who are silly; if it were not so, we should feel pity and not anger.”

— Blaise Pascal

182. “The captain of a ship is not chosen from those of the passengers who comes from the best family.”

— Blaise Pascal

183. “A town, a landscape are when seen from afar a town and a landscape; but as one gets nearer, there are houses, trees, tiles leaves, grasses, ants, legs of ants and so on to infinity. All this is subsumed under the name of landscape.”

— Blaise Pascal

184. “The state of man is inconstancy, ennui, anxiety.”

— Blaise Pascal

185. “Too much and too little wine. Give him none, he cannot find truth; give him too much, the same.”

— Blaise Pascal

186. “Happiness can be found neither in ourselves nor in external things, but in God and in ourselves as united to him.”

— Blaise Pascal

187. “Each man is everything to himself, for with his death everything is dead for him. That is why each of us thinks he is everything to everyone. We must not judge nature by ourselves, but by its own standards.”

— Blaise Pascal

188. “Christian piety annihilates the egoism of the heart; worldly politeness veils and represses it.”

— Blaise Pascal

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

— Blaise Pascal

190. “Faith is different from proof; the latter is human, the former is a Gift from God.”

— Blaise Pascal

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

— Blaise Pascal

192. “All err the more dangerously because each follows a truth. Their mistake lies not in following a falsehood but in not following another truth.”

— Blaise Pascal

193. “Nothing is as approved as mediocrity, the majority has established it and it fixes it fangs on whatever gets beyond it either way.”

— Blaise Pascal

194. “Piety is different from superstition. To carry piety to the extent of superstition is to destroy it. The heretics reproach us with this superstitious submission. It is doing what they reproach us with.”

— Blaise Pascal

195. “Some vices only lay hold of us by means of others, and these, like branches, fall on removal of the trunk.”

— Blaise Pascal

196. “Notwithstanding the sight of all our miseries, which press upon us and take us by the throat, we have an instinct which we cannot repress, and which lifts us up.”

— Blaise Pascal

197. “The gospel to me is simply irresistible.”

— Blaise Pascal

198. “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.”

— Blaise Pascal

199. “Orthodoxy on one side of the Pyrenees may be heresy on the other.”

— Blaise Pascal

200. “Faith affirms many things, respecting which the senses are silent, but nothing that they deny. It is superior, but never opposed to their testimony.”

— Blaise Pascal