Blaise Pascal

The knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him.

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.

The world is a great book, of which we have only read the first page.

To be a man is to be an object of scorn to the angels, and of envy to the devils.

Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.

If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.

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

The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play.

Custom is our nature.

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

We are born into the world with a love for ourselves, and a hate for those who would oppose us.

Justice is subject to dispute; might is easily recognized and is not disputed. So we cannot give might to justice, because might has contradicted justice, and has declared that it is she herself who is just. And thus being unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just.

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are the world's supreme blessings.

The greater the mind, the more the passions.

Men despise religion; they hate it, and fear to be in it.

Custom is our nature. He who is accustomed to faith believes in it, and can no longer fear hell, and does not believe in anything else. And he who is accustomed to sin regards it as nothing, and can no longer fear hell.

It is not good to be too free.

If our condition were truly happy, we should not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it.

We are generally more persuaded by the reasons we have ourselves discovered than by those which have been discovered by others.

The greatest evils are those that are disguised as good.