Blaise Pascal

"Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth."

"Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth."

"Too much and too little wine. Give him none, he cannot find truth; give him too much, the same."

"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?"

"All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone."

"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."

"Atheism shows strength of mind, but only to a certain degree."

"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."

"Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts."

"Faith embraces many truths which seem to contradict each other."

"Faith indeed tells what the senses do not tell, but not the contrary of what they see. It is above them and not contrary to them."

"Faith is different from proof; the latter is human, the former is a Gift from God."

"Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature."

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

"If we must not act save on a certainty, we ought not to act on religion, for it is not certain. But how many things we do on an uncertainty, sea voyages, battles!"

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

"It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory."

"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."

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

"Love has reasons which reason cannot understand."

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed."

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

"Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness."

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

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

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

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

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

"The charm of fame is so great that we like every object to which it is attached, even death."

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

"The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble."

"The strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts."

"There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous."

"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."

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

"Two things control men's nature, instinct and experience."

"We like security: we like the pope to be infallible in matters of faith, and grave doctors to be so in moral questions so that we can feel reassured."

"When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before."