Blaise Pascal

The universe is limitless, and impossible for anyone to understand. Therefore, we cannot completely understand the life of our own body.

How good a person feels when, exhausted from striving for goodness in his everyday life, he stretches out his hands to God.

Those who have decided to dedicate their lives to spiritual perfection will never be dissatisfied or unhappy, because all that they want is in their power.

God created heaven and earth, but they lacked the ability to understand the happiness of their existence. Then God made creatures who could understand the happiness of their existence, and who could create a single body from all of its thinking parts. All people are members of this one body; in order to be happy, they should live in harmony with the will that governs its life. We should live in harmony with this great soul and love it more than we love ourselves.

One of the evil properties of man is that he loves only himself and wants goodness only for himself. But woe to him who loves only himself!

The virtue of a person is measured not by his outstanding efforts, but by his everyday behavior.

Those who do not hate their own selfishness, their placing of themselves higher than the rest of the world, are blind, because this action contradicts the truth.

We are not satisfied with our real life. We want to live an imaginary life, a life in which we seem different in the eyes of other people than we are in reality.

We suffer from our vices, and try to struggle with them, and the reason for this struggle is that we are not perfect. But our salvation is in this struggle with vices, and if God were to take away our ability to fight our vices, then we would be left with them forever.

Is there anything more absurd than a person having a right to kill me because we live on two opposite banks of the river, and our kings quarrel with each other ?

Who brought me into this world? According to whose command do I find myself at this exact place, during this particular time? Life is the remembrance of a very short day we spent visiting this world.

Look for the truth; it wants to be found.

Subduing people through violence is never justice.

People jump back and forth in pursuit of pleasures only because they see the emptiness of their lives more clearly than they do the emptiness of whichever new entertainment attracts them.

Some people seek goodness in power, others in science, others in dissipation. Those people who are really close to goodness understand that real goodness for one is when all people have this goodness and share it among themselves.

Happiness and calmness are neither inside us nor outside us. They are in God, who is both inside and outside us.

Solomon and Job knew and spoke wisely about the uselessness of human life. The first was the happiest, the second the unhappiest of all men. One knew the vanity of pleasure; the other, the reality of misfortune.

Every truth has its origin in God. When it is manifested in a man, this is not because it comes from him, but because he has such a quantity of transparency that he can reveal it.

In the scheme of the world, a person is no more than a pine cone, or a weak herb, or a bit of swamp grass, but he is a grass which possesses some intellect.

There are some statements which cannot be fathomed: God exists or he does not exist; the soul exists in the body, or we do not have a soul; the world was created or the world was not created.

There are two types of ignorance, the pure, natural ignorance into which all people are born, and the ignorance of the so-called wise. You will see that many among those who call themselves scholars do not know real life, and they despise simple people and simple things.

Many of our vices exist only because they are supported by other vices; therefore, if we destroy our major vices, many others will disappear at once, in the same way as branches fall when you cut the trunk of a tree.

If you want other people to speak well of you, do not speak well of yourself.

You must love only God, and you must hate only yourself.