Blaise Pascal

“Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.”

“There is nothing we can now call our own, for what we call so is the effect of art; crimes are made by decrees of the senate, or by the votes of the people; and as here-to-fore we are burdened by vices, so now we are oppressed by laws.”

“L'homme n'est qu'un roseau, le plus faible de la nature; mais c'est un roseau pensant. Il ne faut pas que l'univers entier s'arme pour l'éraser: un vapeur, un goutte d'eau suffit pout le tuer. Mais, quand l'univers l'écraserait, l'homme serait encore plus noble que ce qui le tue, pare qu'il sait qu'il meurt, et l'avantage que l'univers a sur lui, l'univers n'en sait rien.”

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

“Nu m-ai fi cautat, daca nu m-ai fi gasit”

“Everything that is written merely to please the author is worthless.”

“I lay it down as a fact that if all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.”

“Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what it loves.”

“We know the truth, not only be the reason, but also be the heart.”

“O coração tem razões que a Razão desconhece.”

“The manner in which Epictetus, Montaigne, and Salomon de Tultie wrote, is the most usual, the most suggestive, the most remembered, and the oftener quoted; because it is entirely composed of thoughts born from the common talk of life.”

“I see the terrifying spaces of the universe that enclose me, and I find myself attached to a corner of this vast expanse, without knowing why I am more in this place than in another, nor why this little time that is given me to live is assigned me at this point more than another out of all the eternity that has preceded me and out of all that will follow me.”

“they do not know that they seek onlythe chase and not the quarry.”

“Just as I do not know where I came from, so I do not know where I am going. All I know is that when I leave this world I shall fall forever into oblivion, or into the hands of an angry God, without knowing which of the two will be my lot for eternity. Such is my state of mind, full of weakness and uncertainty. The only conclusion I can draw from all this is that I must pass my days without a thought of trying to find out what is going to happen to me.”

“Since we cannot know all there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.”

“El hombre tiene ilusiones como el pájaro alas. Eso es lo que lo sostiene”

“Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?”

“Cleopatra's nose, had it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed.”

“God instituted prayer to communicate to creatures the dignity of causality.”

“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.”

“If we submit everything to reason our religion will be left with nothing mysterious or supernatural. If we offend the principles of reason our religion will be absurd and ridiculous . . . There are two equally dangerous extremes: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason.”

“Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.”

“The world is a good judge of things, for it is in natural ignorance, which is man's true state. The sciences have two extremes which meet. The first is the pure natural ignorance in which all men find themselves at birth. The other extreme is that reached by great intellects, who, having run through all that men can know, find they know nothing, and come back again to that same ignorance from which they set out; but this is a learned ignorance which is conscious of itself. Those between the two, who have departed from natural ignorance and not been able to reach the other, have some smattering of this vain knowledge and pretend to be wise. These trouble the world and are bad judges of everything. The people and the wise constitute the world; these despise it, and are despised. They judge badly of everything, and the world judges rightly of them.”

“And if one loves me for my judgement, memory, he does not love me, for I can lose these qualities without losing myself. Where, then, is this Ego, if it be neither in the body nor in the soul? And how love the body or the soul, except for these qualities which do not constitute me, since they are perishable? For it is impossible and would be unjust to love the soul of a person in the abstract and whatever qualities might be therein. We never, then, love a person, but only qualities. Let us, then, jeer no more at those who are honoured on account of rank and office; for we love a person only on account of borrowed qualities.”

“No religion except ours has taught that man is born in sin; none of the philosophical sects has admitted it; none therefore has spoken the truth”

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

“If God exists, not seeking God must be the gravest error imaginable. If one decides to sincerely seek for God and doesn't find God, the lost effort is negligible in comparison to what is at risk in not seeking God in the first place. ”

“Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.”

“La dernière chose qu'on trouve en faisant un ouvrage est de savoir celle qu'il faut mettre la première. (The last thing one settles in writing a book is what one should put in first.)”

“When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which precedes and will succeed it—memoria hospitis unius diei praetereuntis (remembrance of a guest who tarried but a day)—the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? By whose command and act were this place and time allotted to me?”

“We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.”

“Inima îşi are propriile raţiuni pe care raţiunea nu le cunoaşte|”

“Ci Puo' essere quakcosa di piu' stupido del fatto che un uomo abbia il diritto di uccidermi perche' vive sull'altra sponda di un fiume e il suo sovrano ha avuto una lite con il mio, anche se io non ho litigato con lui?”

“Nature has made all her truths independent of one another. Our art makes one dependent on the other.”

“There is a certain standard of grace and beauty which consists in a certain relation between our nature... and the thing which pleases us.”

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

“There is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition”

“The heart has its order, the mind has its own, which uses principles and demonstrations. The heart has a different one. We do not prove that we ought to be loved by setting out in order the causes of love; that would be absurd.”

“Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it.”

“Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars. I will not forget thy word. Amen.”

“Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it.”

“S'il se vante, je l'abaisse;s'il s'abaisse, je le vante;et le contredis toujours, jusqu'à qu'il comprenne qu'il est un monstre incompréhensible. ”

“We must keep our thought secret, and judge everything by it, while talking like the people.”

“A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.”

“If they [Plato and Aristotle] wrote about politics it was as if to lay down rules for a madhouse.And if they pretended to treat it as something really important it was because they knew that the madmen they were talking to believed themselves to be kings and emperors. They humoured these beliefs in order to calm down their madness with as little harm as possible.”

“And is it not obvious that, just as it is a crime to disturb the peace when truth reigns, it is also a crime to remain at peace when the truth is being destroyed?”

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

“People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.”

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

“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.”