Blaise Pascal Giving Quotations

Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them.

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

Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.

I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he would have been quite willing to dispense with God. But he had to make Him give a fillip to set the world in motion; beyond this, he has no further need of God.

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.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. We feel it in a thousand things. I say that the heart naturally loves the Universal Being, and naturally loves itself; and it gives itself to one or the other, and hardens itself against one or the other, as it chooses...it is the heart that feels God, not the reason; this is faith.

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

Instead of complaining that God had hidden himself, you will give Him thanks for having revealed so much of Himself.

He who cannot believe is cursed, for he reveals by his unbelief that God has not chosen to give him grace.

The law required what it could not give. Grace gives that which it requires.

Meanings receive their dignity from words instead of giving it to them.

Who confers reputation? who gives respect and veneration to persons, to books, to great men? Who but Opinion? How utterly insufficient are all the riches of the world without her approbation!

There are hardly any truths upon which we always remain agreed, and still fewer objects of pleasure which we do not change every hour, I do not know whether there is a means of giving fixed rules for adapting discourse to the inconstancy of our caprices.

The mind of the greatest man on earth is not so independent of circumstances as not to feel inconvenienced by the merest buzzing noise about him; it does not need the report of a cannon to disturb his thoughts. The creaking of a vane or a pully is quite enough. Do not wonder that he reasons ill just now; a fly is buzzing by his ear; it is quite enough to unfit him for giving good counsel.

Therefore, those to whom God has imparted religion by intuition are very fortunate and justly convinced. But to those who do not have it, we can give it only by reasoning, waiting for God to give them spiritual insight, without which faith is only human and useless for salvation.

We are troubled only by the fears which we, and not nature, give ourselves.

When a soldier complains of his hard life (or a labourer, etc.) try giving him nothing to do.