Blaise Pascal

There is a God-shaped vacuum in every heart.

We are so presumptuous that we should like to be known all over the world, even by people who will only come when we are no more. Such is our vanity that the good opinion of half a dozen of the people around us gives us pleasure and satisfaction.

We make an idol of truth itself; for truth apart from charity is not God, but His image and idol, which we must neither love nor worship.

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

People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered themselves than by those found by others.

All man's troubles come from not knowing how to sit still in one room.

Desire and force between them are responsible for all our actions; desire causes our voluntary acts, force our involuntary.

If our condition were truly happy, we would not seek diversion from it in order to make ourselves happy.

The manner in which Epictetus, Montaigne, and Salomon de Tultie wrote, is the most usual, the most suggestive, the most remembered, and the oftener quoted; because it is entirely composed of thoughts born from the common talk of life.

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

We have so exalted a notion of the human soul that we cannot bear to be despised, or even not to be esteemed by it. Man, in fact, places all his happiness in this esteem.

Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.

I bring you the gift of these four words: I believe in you.

Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars. I will not forget thy word. Amen.

The last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

The struggle alone pleases us, not the victory.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

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

We know that there is an infinite, and we know not its nature. As we know it to be false that numbers are finite, it is therefore true that there is a numerical infinity. But we know not of what kind; it is untrue that it is even, untrue that it is odd; for the addition of a unit does not change its nature; yet it is a number, and every number is odd or even (this certainly holds of every finite number). Thus we may quite well know that there is a God without knowing what He is.

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.