Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.
Blaise PascalRead
Imagination magnifies small objects with fantastic exaggeration until they fill our soul, and with bold insolence cuts down great things to its own size, as when speaking of God.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Imagination can amplify minor details and simplify grand concepts, affecting our perception of reality.
In this quote, Blaise Pascal reflects on the power of imagination in shaping our understanding of the world. He suggests that our imaginative faculties have the ability to amplify seemingly insignificant things to monumental proportions, as well as diminish profound and complex ideas, such as the concept of God, to fit the confines of our limited perception. This exploration emphasizes how imagination can distort our perception, reminding us of its dual capabilities to enhance and simplify.
Themes
ImaginationPerceptionRealityExaggerationUnderstanding
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational speech, one could use this quote to discuss how our perceptions shape our ambitions.
More from Blaise Pascal
All quotes βIf we submit everything to reason our religion will be left with nothing mysterious or supernatural. If we offend the principles of reason our religion will be absurd and ridiculous . . . There are two equally dangerous extremes: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason.
Blaise PascalRead
Those are weaklings who know the truth and uphold it as long as it suits their purpose, and then abandon it.
Blaise PascalRead
Jesus is the God whom we can approach without pride and before whom we can humble ourselves without despair.
Blaise PascalRead
If he exalts himself, I humble him. If he humbles himself, I exalt him. And I go on contradicting him Until he understands That he is a monster that passes all understanding.
Blaise PascalRead
What use is it to us to hear it said of a man that he has thrown off the yoke that he does not believe there is a God to watch over his actions, that he reckons himself the sole master of his behavior, and that he does not intend to give an account of it to anyone but himself?
Blaise PascalRead
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I enjoyed having a reputation as being wild, but these days I try not to worry about what people think in the privacy of their own brain or what they write in the bizarre publicity of their own newspapers, because all of those things are meaningless.
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Translation rewrites a foreign text in terms that are intelligible and interesting to readers in the receiving culture. Doing so is akin to committing an act of ethnocentric violence by uprooting the text from the language and culture that gave it life. Translating into current, standard English at once conceals that violence and homogenizes foreign cultures.
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Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illumnations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
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The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship
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