Blaise Pascal

There is a certain standard of grace and beauty which consists in a certain relation between our nature... and the thing which pleases us.

Nature has set us so well in the center, that if we change one side of the balance, we change the other also. I act. This makes me believe that the springs in our brain are so adjusted that he who touches one touches also its contrary.

Rivers are roads which move, and which carry us whither we desire to go.

People of education are not called poets or mathematicians, &c.; but they are all these, and judges of all these.

So if we are simply material, we can know nothing at all; and if we are composed of mind and matter, we cannot know perfectly things which are simple, whether spiritual or corporeal. Hence it comes that almost all philosophers have confused ideas of things, and speak of material things in spiritual terms, and of spiritual things in material terms. For they say boldly that bodies have a tendency to fall, that they seek after their centre, that they fly from destruction, that they fear the void, that they have inclinations, sympathies, antipathies, all of which attributes pertain only to mind. And in speaking of minds, they consider them as in a place, and attribute to them movement from one place to another; and these are qualities which belong only to bodies.

...it is impossible that our rational part should be other than spiritual; and if any one maintain that we are simply corporeal, this would far more exclude us from the knowledge of things, there being nothing so inconceivable as to say that matter knows itself. It is impossible to imagine how it should know itself.

You are ungraceful: "Excuse me, pray." Without that excuse I would not have known there was anything amiss. "With reverence be it spoken..." The only thing bad is their excuse.

We only consult the ear because the heart is wanting.