Blaise Pascal
Pascal's Wager, mathematician
Sayings by Blaise Pascal
It is dangerous to make a man see too clearly his equality with brutes without showing him his greatness.
Custom is the principal source of persuasion.
The only good philosophy is that which makes fun of philosophy.
Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would be to be a madman of another kind of madness.
All our dignity consists in thought. It is by this that we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time, which we cannot fill. Let us endeavor, then, to think well; this is the principle of morality.
The greater the intelligence, the greater the capacity for suffering.
We must laugh at what we despise, and not at what we fear.
The strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special efforts, but by his ordinary doing.
The true morality is to laugh at morality.
It is not by the force of reason that we have adopted religion, but by the force of habit.
How vain it is to boast of one's own merit, when one is but a fragment of the universe!
The world is full of things that are true, but not reasonable.
Man is full of desires, and desires are full of misery.
We never love a person, but only qualities.
It is the nature of man to believe, and to disbelieve.
The only good is knowledge, and the only evil is ignorance.
The most dangerous of all errors is to deny the existence of sin.
We are nothing but a heap of contradictions.
The true religion teaches us our duties, our weaknesses, the pride and self-love that corrupt us, and the remedies which will cure us.
The greatest heresy is to believe in no God.