Blaise Pascal

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?

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?

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

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

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.

Our nature consists in motion complete rest is death.

Man's true nature being lost, everything becomes his nature as, his true good being lost, everything becomes his good.

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

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

Men often take their imagination for their heart and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.

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

Men blaspheme what they do not know.

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

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.

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

The sensitivity of men to small matters, and their indifference to great ones, indicates a strange inversion.

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.

If all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.

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

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.

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

The knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him.

Vanity of science. Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical scienc…