Blaise Pascal

Cleopatra's nose: had it been shorter, the whole aspect of the world would have been altered.

Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.

To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. All our dignity consists, then, in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavour, then, to think well; this is the principle of morality.

We want truth and find only uncertainty in ourselves.

We seek happiness and find only wretchedness and death.

We are incapable of not wanting truth and happiness and are incapable of certainty or happiness.

Now, if the passions had no hold on us, a week and a hundred years would amount to the same.

The two principles of truth, reason and senses, are not only both not genuine, but are engaged in mutual deception. The senses deceive reason through false appearances, and the senses are disturbed by passions, which produce false impressions.

I would be much more afraid of being wrong and finding out that the Christian religion is true than of being wrong in believing it to be true.

Man does not know what rank he should occupy. He has obviously gone astray and fallen from his true place, lacking the power to find it again. He looks for it everywhere anxiously and unsuccessfully, in impenetrable darkness.

Whoever wants to know man's vanity fully has only to consider the causes and effects of love. The cause is a something I know not what. Corneille. And the effects are frightening. This something I know not what, so insignificant that we cannot recognize it, disturbs the whole earth, princes, armies, the entire world. Cleopatra's nose: had it been shorter, the whole face of the earth would have been changed.

Thinking too little about things or thinking too much both make us obstinate and fanatical.

This internal war of reason against the passions has made a division of those who would have peace into two sects. The first would renounce their passions, and become gods; the others would renounce reason, and become brute beasts. But neither can do so, and reason still remains, to condemn the vileness and injustice of the passions, and to trouble the repose of those who abandon themselves to them; and the passions keep always alive in those who would renounce them.