Blaise Pascal

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.

We are born into a world where everything is determined by chance.

If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.

To make a man a saint, it must be that grace should be given him, and that he should be a saint; and he who does not feel this, does not know what a saint is.

The only good philosophy is that which makes us doubt.

It is dangerous to show man too clearly how like he is to the beasts without showing him his greatness. It is dangerous also to show him his greatness too much without showing him his baseness. It is still more dangerous to leave him in ignorance of both. But it is very advantageous to show him both.

The fact that a man who is a Christian is not a Jew is a proof that he is not a Christian.

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; depository of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the glory and the scum of the universe.

If we submit everything to reason, our religion will have nothing mysterious or supernatural. If we offend the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous.

The true morality, the true wisdom, is to live in the present, to enjoy the present, to make the best of the present.

We are so presumptuous that we would like to be known to all the world, even to those who will come after we are gone; and we are so vain that we want to be esteemed by five or six people around us.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

The Christian religion, by obliging us to love God, and to hate ourselves, is a religion of paradoxes.

It is the nature of self-love and of this human 'I' to love itself alone and consider itself as the center of everything.

The greatest pleasure of a dog is to lay its head in your lap.

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

Do you wish people to think well of you? Don't speak well of yourself.

We know the truth not only by the reason, but also by the heart.

I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.