Quotes
Quotes - Pascal
Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.
It is not permitted to the most equitable of men to be a judge in his own cause.
Montaigne is wrong in declaring that custom ought to be followed simply because it is custom, and not because it is reasonable or just.
Thus we never live, but we hope to live; and always disposing ourselves to be happy, it is inevitable that we never become so.
If the nose of Cleopatra had been shorter, the whole face of the earth would have been changed.
The last thing that we find in making a book is to know what we must put first.
Rivers are highways that move on, and bear us whither we wish to go.
What a chimera, then, is man! what a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! A judge of all things, feeble worm of the earth, depositary of the truth, cloaca of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe!
We know the truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart.
For as old age is that period of life most remote from infancy, who does not see that old age in this universal man ought not to be sought in the times nearest his birth, but in those most remote from it?
The heart has its reasons that the mind knows nothing of.
Wisdom sends us back to our childhood.
Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.
I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
We are usually convinced more easily by reasons we have found ourselves than by those which have occurred to others.
Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism.
I cannot judge my work while I am doing it. I have to do as painters do, stand back and view it from a distance, but not too great a distance.
Those who write against vanity want the glory of having written well, and their readers the glory of reading well, and I who write this have the same desire, as perhaps those who read this have also.
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.
Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.
A man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once.
There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who believe themselves sinners; the sinners who believe themselves righteous.
If all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.
Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.
