Blaise Pascal

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

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?

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.

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

The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.

Two things control men's nature, instinct and experience.

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.

I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live as if there isn't and to die to find out that there is.

Love has reasons which reason cannot understand.

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

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

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

There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.

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.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

Happiness is neither without us nor within us. It is in God, both without us and within us.

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

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.

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

There are two kinds of people one can call reasonable: those who serve God with all their heart because they know him, and those who seek him with all their heart because they do not know him.

It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.

Jesus is the God whom we can approach without pride and before whom we can humble ourselves without despair.

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

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.