Pascal Quotes

“When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.”
― Blaise Pascal

“[Pascal] was the first and perhaps is still the most effective voice to be raised in warning of the consequences of the enthronement of the human ego in contradistinction to the cross, symbolizing the ego's immolation. How beautiful it all seemed at the time of the Enlightenment, that man triumphant would bring to pass that earthly paradise whose groves of academe would ensure the realization forever of peace, plenty, and beatitude in practice. But what a nightmare of wars, famines, and folly was to result therefrom.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom

“What Pascal overlooked was the hair-raising possibility that God might out-Luther Luther. A special area in hell might be reserved for those who go to mass. Or God might punish those whose faith is prompted by prudence. Perhaps God prefers the abstinent to those who whore around with some denomination he despises. Perhaps he reserves special rewards for those who deny themselves the comfort of belief. Perhaps the intellectual ascetic will win all while those who compromised their intellectual integrity lose everything.

There are many other possibilities. There might be many gods, including one who favors people like Pascal; but the other gods might overpower or outvote him, à la Homer. Nietzsche might well have applied to Pascal his cutting remark about Kant: when he wagered on God, the great mathematician 'became an idiot.”
― Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy

“Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars. I will not forget thy word. Amen.”
― Blaise Pascal

“There is a wide yawning black infinity. In every direction the extension is endless, the sensation of depth is overwhelming. And the darkness is immortal. Where light exists, it is pure, blazing, fierce; but light exists almost nowhere, and the blackness itself is also pure and blazing and fierce. But most of all, there is very nearly nothing in the dark; except for little bits here and there, often associated with the light, this infinite receptacle is empty.

This picture is strangely frightening. It should be familiar. It is our universe.

Even these stars, which seem so numerous, are, as sand, as dust, or less than dust, in the enormity of the space in which there is nothing. Nothing! We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal’s Pensées and read, 'I am the great silent spaces between worlds.'

[From an undated, handwritten piece of text from the early 1950s which Sagan wrote when he was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago]”
― Carl Sagan

“If this were so; if the desert were 'home'; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert - then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal's imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison.”
― Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines

“إن احتقار النفس يولد أكثر النزعات اجراما : لأنه يجعل الشخص ينطوي على كراهية قاتلة للحقيقة التي تدينه هو وتظهر عيوبه”
― Blaise Pascal

“Just as all things speak about God to those that know Him, and reveal Him to those that love Him, they also hide Him from all those that neither seek nor know Him.”
― Blaise Pascal

“Pascal's scientific achievements, therefore, did not give him much confidence in the human condition. When he contemplated the immensity of the universe, he was scared stiff:
'When I see the blind and wretched state of man, when I survey the whole universe in its dumbness and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who put him there, what he has come to do, what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quiet lost with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.”
― Karen Armstrong, A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam

“There is a remarkable sentence of Pascal according to which we know too little to be dogmatists and too much to be skeptics, which expresses beautifully what Plato conveys through his dialogues.”
― Leo Strauss, On Plato's Symposium

“There are three sources of belief: reason, custom, inspiration.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Thought constitutes the greatness of man. Man is a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.”
― Blaise Pascal

“—Pascal, if I remember rightly, would not suffer his mother to kiss him as he feared the contact of her sex.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“The sum of evil, Pascal remarked, would be much diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell

“Kepler’s discovery would not have been possible without the doctrine of conics. Now contemporaries of Kepler—such penetrating minds as Descartes and Pascal—were abandoning the study of geometry ... because they said it was so UTTERLY USELESS. There was the future of the human race almost trembling in the balance; for had not the geometry of conic sections already been worked out in large measure, and had their opinion that only sciences apparently useful ought to be pursued, the nineteenth century would have had none of those characters which distinguish it from the ancien régime.”
― Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Volumes V and VI, Pragmatism and Pragmaticism and Scientific Metaphysics

“Miracles enable us to judge doctrine, and doctrine enables us to judge miracles.”
― Blaise Pascal

“The most surprising and original part of [Lucien Goldmann's] work is, however, the attempt to compare—without assimilating one to another—religious faith and Marxist faith: both have in common the refusal of pure individualism (rationalist or empiricist) and the belief in trans-individual values—God for religion, the human community for socialism. In both cases the faith is based on a wager—the Pascalian wager on the existence of God and the Marxist wager on the liberation of humanity—that presupposes risk, the danger of failure and the hope of success.”
― Michael Löwy, The War of Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America

“Pascal is for building pyramids -- imposing, breathtaking, static structures built by armies pushing heavy blocks into place. Lisp is for building organisms -- imposing, breathtaking, dynamic structures built by squads fitting fluctuating myriads of simpler organisms into place.”
― Harold Abelson; Gerald Jay Sussman; Julie Sussman; Eiichi Wada

“La giustizia è soggetta a discussione, la forza è molto riconosciuta e indiscussa. Così non si è potuto dare la forza alla giustizia perché la forza ha contraddetto la giustizia e ha affermato che solo lei era giusta. E così, non potendo ottenere che ciò che è giusto sia forte, si è fatto sì che ciò che è forte sia giusto”
― Blaise Pascal

“These three people, Pascal, Blake, and Dostoyevsky, illustrate perfectly what I have long believed to be the case, that history consists of parables whereby God communicates in terms that the imagination rather than the mind, faith rather than knowledge, can grasp.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom

“Niciodată nu rămânem în prezent. Anticipăm viitorul, ca şi cum ni s-ar părea că soseşte prea greu şi încercăm să-l grăbim; evocăm trecutul, ca şi cum am încerca să oprim repeziciunea cu care se îndepărtează de noi. Suntem atât de nesăbuiți, încât cutreierăm doar timpuri care nu sunt ale noastre și nu ne gândim nicio clipă la singurul timp care ne aparține; şi atât de vanitoși, încât visăm la timpuri care nu există în momentul de față, lăsând să ne scape singurul care există. Adevărul este că, adesea, prezentul e dureros. Îl ascundem privirii noastre, fiindcă ne provoacă suferinţă, iar dacă e plăcut, regretăm că se indepărtează. Încercăm să-l susţinem cu ajutorul viitorului și ne gândim cum să organizăm lucruri pe care nu le putem controla, pentru un moment la care nu putem fi siguri că vom ajunge. Dacă fiecare şi-ar analiza gândurile, le-ar găsi preocupate în întregime de trecut ori de viitor. Mai niciodată nu ne gândim la prezent, iar dacă o facem, e doar pentru a căpăta o perspectivă asupra viitorului. Prezentul nu e niciodată ţelul nostru. Trecutul şi prezentul ne sunt doar mijloacele de care ne folosim, singurul nostru țel fiind viitorul. Astfel, nu ajungem niciodată să trăim cu adevărat, ci doar sperăm să o facem. Și, din moment ce plănuim neîncetat cum să fim fericiți, inevitabil, nu vom fi niciodată.”
― Blaise Pascal, Despre fericire

“Auerbach kitaplarından birinde, gözüme onun bir denemesi çarptı. Pascal üzerine yazılmış bu denemenin adı, "Kötünün Zaferi" idi. Auerbach'ın Pascal'dan alıntıladığı giriş bölümü beni çok etkiledi ve son günlerde çeşitli örneklerini öğrendiğim devlet zulmüne bir açıklama getirdi:
Adil olanın peşinden gidilmesi doğrudur, en güçlünün peşinden gidilmesi ise kaçınılmazdır. Gücü olmayan adalet acizdir; adaleti olmayan güç ise zalim. Gücü olmayan adalete mutlaka bir karşı çıkan olur, çünkü kötü insanlar her zaman vardır. Adaleti olmayan güç ise töhmet altında kalır. Demek ki adalet ile gücü bir araya getirmek gerek; bunu yapabilmek için de adil olanın güçlü, güçlü olanın ise adil olması gerekir.
Adalet tartışmaya açıktır. Güç ise ilk bakışta tartışılmaz biçimde anlaşılır. Bu nedenle gücü adalete veremedik, çünkü güç, adalete karşı çıkıp kendisinin adil olduğunu söylemişti. Haklı olanı güçlü kılamadığımız için de güçlü olanı haklı kıldık.”
― Zülfü Livaneli, Serenad

“Hypocrisy, Milton wrote, is “the only evil that walks Invisible, except to God alone.” To ensure that “neither Man nor Angel can discern” the evil is, nonetheless, a demanding vocation. Pascal had discussed it a few years earlier while recording “how the casuists reconcile the contrarieties between their opinions and the decisions of the popes, the councils, and the Scripture.” “One of the methods in which we reconcile these contradictions,” his casuist interlocutor explains, “is by the interpretation of some phrase.” Thus, if the Gospel says, “Give alms of your superfluity,” and the task is “to discharge the wealthiest from the obligation of alms-giving,” “the matter is easily put to rights by giving such an interpretation to the word superfluity that it will seldom or never happen that any one is troubled with such an article.” Learned scholars demonstrate that “what men of the world lay up to improve their circumstances, or those of their relatives, cannot be termed superfluity; and accordingly, such a thing as superfluity is seldom to be found among men of the world, not even excepting kings”—nowadays, we call it tax reform. We may, then, adhere faithfully to the preachings of the Gospel that “the rich are bound to give alms of their superfluity,… [though] it will seldom or never happen to be obligatory in practice.” “There you see the utility of interpretations,” he concludes.”
― Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies

“She knew it was a lizard from pictures in the fairy-tale book, long and lithe and dry and scaly but with legs, unlike a snake (lizards were turned into handsome footmen in "Cinderella"). Probably a skink of some kind. The reptile bore her touch with the vacuous patience of a cold-blooded creature that liked to be warm and didn't smell anything dangerous like a fox or a hawk. Its experience with humans was minimal to none.
Rapunzel, of course, assumed this not-running-away meant it was a potential Wilderness Friend.
"I'm not going to kill you," she promised the little lizard and herself. "You adorable soft-skinned thing! You're perfect!"
She would tell her mother what she had done and then show her mother the lizard... and then it was only a matter of convincing her to take her to the floating lights. She wasn't a danger.
"Isn't that right... Pascal? I'm going to call you Pascal!" And with that she plucked the lizard deftly up and put him on her shoulder.”
― Liz Braswell, What Once Was Mine

“Without knowing why, she brought her hair up to Pascal again. She knew he wouldn't be hurt. The little lizard was intrigued by whatever was going on; he nosed into her locks like a curious kitten.
Immediately the sparkles that pulsed through her hair danced around him, falling and flickering. Soon they completely covered the little lizard like snow. Rapunzel watched, enchanted.
Then he sneezed. Embers of magic flicked and faded as they fell to the earth.
Rapunzel gasped.
Pascal was perfectly fine.
He just wasn't-- Pascal.
He was an entirely different lizard. A lizard Rapunzel had never seen before, in books or anywhere. His eyes were now two balls that perched on the sides of his head and looked around independently of each other. His back was a graceful arch. His feet had two pairs of strange toes that opened up in the middle like claws. And his tail! It curled around and around and clasped onto her arm- prehensile and grasping, not a limp thing that just hung there to help with balance (and to occasionally break off and confuse a predator).
And he was looking at himself! Holding his feet out one at a time and admiring them, thwacking the tip of his tail and snapping his mouth in satisfaction. Like a... person. He thoughtfully gazed back at his body, considering it.
His skin suddenly started to change color: a wave of brown, and then red, pulsed through him from nose to tail.
"Pascal!" Rapunzel cried. "You're a dragon!"
She only wished he had turned into a slightly larger dragon so she could ride and/or hug him.”
― Liz Braswell, What Once Was Mine

“The modern sense of entertainment increasingly resembles what Pascal long ago called divertissement: that is, an activity—as he wrote in his Thoughts—that separates us from the seriousness of existence and fills this existence with false content. Divertissement is thus not only being entertained in the ordinary sense of the word, but living and acting within artificial rules that organize our lives, setting conventional and mostly trivial goals which we pursue, getting involved in disputes and competitions, aspiring to honors-making careers, and doing everything that would turn our thoughts away from fundamental existential matters. By escaping the questions of the ultimate meaning of our own lives, or of human life in general, our minds.”
― Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies

“A civilization worthy of that name will always feel guilty toward Man and that is, precisely, what makes it a civilization.” Pascal, probably. It’s always Pascal with the French, when it’s not La Rochefoucauld. Aristocratic bastards.”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“Pascal says more or less: "Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.”
― Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses

“I have referred to the air of drama which meets you everywhere in the pages of Sainte-Beuve. He sometimes gets the credit for having dramatized the situation. I wonder, was it he who dramatized the situation or was it the people who were actors in the story? And in particular, was it not Mother Angelique? That great woman was not without her faults; Bremond (who compares her unfavourably throughout with her sister Agnes) writes of her imperiousness, her prodigious freedom in passing judgements on her neighbour; there was no dealing with a woman who was at once up in the clouds and scrupulous. 1 But it is not of her faults that I would write here; they were personal to herself What is more important, it seems to me, is a single weakness which she contrived to hand on to her spiritual children. She was incurably self-conscious; she was always dramatizing situations. She herself said that the object of humiliations was to destroy self and my own will, and the I and the my; St. Cyran, Pascal, Nicole did the same. Of their supernatural achievements it is not for us to judge; but as a matter of plain earthly fact it seems clear that no one of the four ever got rid of that self-consciousness which makes you see yourself out of the comer of your eye at every turn in life.”
― Ronald Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion