Blaise Pascal II

The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.

Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

You always admire what you really don't understand.

Kind words don't cost much. Yet they accomplish much.

I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.

Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.

Il n'est pas certain que tout soit incertain.
(Translation: It is not certain that everything is uncertain.)

All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.

When one does not love too much, one does not love enough.

Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what it loves.

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?