People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered themselves than by those found by others.
— Blaise Pascal
Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason.
Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.
In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.
Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.
If all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.
In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't.
I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.
Do you wish people to think well of you? Don't speak well of yourself.
All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.
The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.
Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.
It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.
Faith is different from proof; the latter is human, the former is a Gift from God.
Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.
The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.
Too much and too little wine. Give him none, he cannot find truth; give him too much, the same.
Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.
Human beings must be known to be loved; but Divine beings must be loved to be known.
Faith embraces many truths which seem to contradict each other.
It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.
The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.
Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.
We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike.
Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?
Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness... and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him.
Noble deeds that are concealed are most esteemed.
Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much.
