Blaise Pascal

What is man in nature? A nothing in comparison with the infinite, an all in comparison with the nothing, a mean between nothing and all.

The only good thing in life is to be happy; but we are never happy.

Man is so great that his greatness is known even in his knowing himself to be miserable.

The present is never our end. The past and present are our means; the future alone is our end. Thus we never live, but we hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would be to be affected by another type of madness, and to be affected by a savage degree of madness.

Imagination decides everything.

We are full of things that are not ourselves, and empty of ourselves.

The world is full of things that are not ourselves.

Man is a creature who lives by faith and not by bread alone.

The true religion must have as its principle to adore God and to love Him.

We are so unhappy that we can only be happy by diversion.

The knowledge of God without that of our misery produces pride. The knowledge of our misery without that of God produces despair.

Man is a monster, incomprehensible, contradictory, a chaos, a subject full of error, and of truth, a heap of doubt, and of certainty, a mixture of good, and of evil.

We are born into a world where everything is already decided for us.

The only way to escape the corruption of the world is to be in it, but not of it.

What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth, depositary of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error, the glory and the scum of the universe.

The Christian religion alone makes man truly happy.

To make a man a saint, it is necessary to make him a sinner.

The world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.

There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus Christ.