50 Blaise Pascal Quotes From the French Mathematician, Philosopher, and Writer
Check out these Blaise Pascal quotes to learn more about the genius mathematician and philosopher.
Blaise Pascal was born in Clermont-Ferrand, France, in 1623 and died in Paris, France, in 1662 at the young age of 39.
Pascal was a child prodigy who excelled at mathematics and science and wrote a treatise on projective geometry at the age of 16.
When he was 19 years old, he started to work on calculating machines.
He established himself as one of the first two inventors of the mechanical calculator.
Near the end of his life, Pascal introduced the first bus line that made it possible to move many passengers within Paris in a multi-seated carriage.
Take a look at these Blaise Pascal quotes to learn more about this genius man.
Top Blaise Pascal Quotes
These popular Blaise Pascal quotes will show you what a deep thinker he was.
1. “Law, without force, is impotent.” — Blaise Pascal
2. “Love has reasons which reason cannot understand.” — Blaise Pascal
3. “To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize.” — Blaise Pascal
4. “All men seek happiness. This is without exception.” — Blaise Pascal
5. “You always admire what you really don’t understand.” — Blaise Pascal
6. “Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.” — Blaise Pascal
7. “Dull minds are never either intuitive or mathematical.” — Blaise Pascal
8. “Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much.” — Blaise Pascal
9. “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” — Blaise Pascal
10. “Little things comfort us because little things distress us.” — Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal Quotes to Reflect On
Pascal’s words are simple yet have a way of creating new paths of thinking to dive deeper into each of his statements.
11. “When one does not love too much, one does not love enough.” — Blaise Pascal
12. “Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.” — Blaise Pascal
13. “It is man’s natural sickness to believe that he possesses the truth.” — Blaise Pascal
14. “Do you wish people to think well of you? Don’t speak well of yourself.” — Blaise Pascal
15. “Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.” — Blaise Pascal
16. “All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.” — Blaise Pascal
17. “Don’t try to add more years to your life. Better add more life to your years.” — Blaise Pascal
18. “Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.” — Blaise Pascal
19. “All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.” — Blaise Pascal
20. “When we are in love, we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before.” — Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal Quotes to Remember
See if any of these quotes from Pascal get you thinking in a new way.
21. “We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.” — Blaise Pascal
22. “Human beings must be known to be loved, but Divine beings must be loved to be known.” — Blaise Pascal
23. “I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” — Blaise Pascal
24. “Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.” — Blaise Pascal
25. “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” — Blaise Pascal
26. “Happiness is neither without us nor within us. It is in God, both without us and within us.” — Blaise Pascal
27. “The lease movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.” — Blaise Pascal
28. “Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.” — Blaise Pascal
29. “Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it.” — Blaise Pascal
30. “We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves.” — Blaise Pascal
Wise Quotes from Blaise Pascal
Here are some more wise words from the famous philosopher.
31. “The strength of a man’s virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts.” — Blaise Pascal
32. “People are usually more convinced by freemasons they discovered themselves than by those found by others.” — Blaise Pascal
33. “In faith, there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.” — Blaise Pascal
34. “He takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God’s providence to lead him aright.” — Blaise Pascal
35. “Jesus is the God whom we can approach without pride and before whom we can humble ourselves without despair.” — Blaise Pascal
36. “Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.” — Blaise Pascal
37. “Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.” — Blaise Pascal
38. “Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.” — Blaise Pascal
39. “The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.” — Blaise Pascal
40. “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.” — Blaise Pascal
More Blaise Pascal Quotes
Here are a few final quotes from Pascal to reflect on.
41. “Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.” — Blaise Pascal
42. “The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.” — Blaise Pascal
43. “There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.” — Blaise Pascal
44. “People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.” — Blaise Pascal
45. “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.” — Blaise Pascal
46. “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.” — Blaise Pascal
47. “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?” — Blaise Pascal
48. “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.” — Blaise Pascal
49. “The Christian religion teaches me two points—that there is a God whom men can know, and that their nature is so corrupt that they are unworthy of Him.” — Blaise Pascal
50.“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 science.” — Blaise Pascal
What Else Did Blaise Care About?
Blaise Pascal cared very much for his sister Jacqueline, and in 1646 they both started following the movement within the Catholic religion called Jansenism.
Pascal became very involved in Jansenism and wrote multiple works defending the movement.
He continued to be religious, and his last words were, “May God never abandon me.”
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