Quotes by Blaise Pascal

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

"Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death."

"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? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists."

"In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't."

"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."

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

"Imagination decides everything."

"Noble deeds that are concealed are most esteemed."

"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."

"Man's greatness lies in his power of thought."

"Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just."

"Human beings must be known to be loved; but Divine beings must be loved to be known."

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

"He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God's providence to lead him aright."

"Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it."

"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?"

"Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything."

"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."

"The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me."

"Through space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; through thought I comprehend the world."

"Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness... and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him."

"Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without a passion, without business, without entertainment, without care."