Blaise Pascal's Quotes you need to Know before 40 | Life Changing Quotes

We never love a person but only qualities. It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory. Desire and force between them are responsible for all our actions. Desire causes our voluntary acts, force our involuntary. Man's greatness lies in his power of thought. Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness. Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. Dull minds are never either intuitive or mathematical. If all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world. Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. It is false Don't try to add more years to your life. Better add more life to your years. 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? Do you wish people to think well of you? Don't speak well of yourself. Man's sensitivity to the little things and insensitivity to the greatest are the signs of a strange disorder. Man is obviously made for thinking. Therein lies all his dignity and his merit. And his whole duty is to think as he ought. Those who do not hate their own selfishness and regard themselves as more important than the rest of the world are blind because the truth lies elsewhere. Atheism shows strength of mind, but only to a certain degree. As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all. Indifficult times carry something beautiful in your heart. Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too. This is why a great and clear mind loves audibly and sees distinctly what it loves. Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed. I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter. Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it. We run carelessly to the precipice after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it. We must learn our limits. We are all something, but none of us are everything. Justice without force is powerless. Force without justice is tyrannical. 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. Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that unless we love the truth, we cannot know it. Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary. Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, sceptically of scepticism. Nothing is as approved as mediocrity. The majority has established it, and it fixes its fangs on whatever gets beyond it either way. The heart has its reasons which reason knows not. The vanity of the sciences. Physical science will not console me for the ignorance of morality in the time of affliction, but the science of ethics will always console me for the ignorance of the physical sciences. The more I see of mankind, the more I prefer my dog. One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better. When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before. Noble deeds that are concealed are most esteemed. If you want to be a real seeker of truth, you need to, at least once in your lifetime, doubt in, as much as it's possible, in everything. A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us. All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Brave deeds are wasted when hidden. Through space, the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom. Through thought, I comprehend the world. The captain of a ship is not chosen from those of the passengers who comes from the best family. To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher. The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. Atri does not know itself to be wretched. The last act is bloody, however pleasant all the rest of the players. A little earth is thrown at last upon our head and that is the end forever. 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. Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries. Yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries. It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants. Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth. Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything. Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world. We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. To find recreation in amusement is not happiness. All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling. Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. He that takes truth for his guide and duty for his end may safely trust to God's providence to lead him aright. Human beings must be known to be loved, but divine beings must be loved to be known. The Christian religion teaches me two points that there is a God who men can know and that their nature is so corrupt that they are unworthy of him. In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't. There are only two kinds of men, the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous. It is incomprehensible that God should exist and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist. If a man is not made for God, why is he happy only in God? The knowledge of God is very far from the love of him. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me. Kind words don't cost much, yet they accomplish much. People are usually more convinced by reasons they discover themselves than by those found by others. You always admire what you really don't understand. Chance gives rise to thoughts and chance removes them. No art can keep or acquire them. Words differently arranged to have a different meaning and meanings differently arranged have different effects. The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason. The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men. Happiness is neither within us nor without us. It is in the union of ourselves with God. There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the creator, made known through Jesus. People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof, but on the basis of what they find attractive. Faith is different from proof. The latter is human, the former is a gift from God. That we must love one God only is a thing so evident that it does not require miracles to prove it. Instead of complaining that God had hidden himself, you will give him thanks for having revealed so much of himself.