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Necessity, that great refuge and excuse for human frailty, breaks through all law and he is not to be accounted in fault whose crime is not the effect of choice, but force.

Blaise Pascal

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Blaise Pascal
Age: 39 †
Born: 1623
Born: June 19
Died: 1662
Died: August 19
French Moralist
Mathematician
Philosopher
Physicist
Statistician
Theologian
Writer
Clarmont-Ferrand
Pascal
Louis de Montalte
Amos Dettonville
Dettonville
Paskal Blez
Humans
Whose
Refuge
Great
Crime
Breaks
Effects
Fault
Break
Necessity
Choices
Excuse
Law
Faults
Force
Effect
Accounted
Human
Choice
Frailty

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True eloquence scorns eloquence.
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Men seek rest in a struggle against difficulties and when they have conquered these, rest becomes insufferable.
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One has followed the other in an endless circle, for it is certain that as man's insight increases so he finds both wretchedness and greatness within himself. In a word man knows he is wretched. Thus he is wretched because he is so, but he is truly great because he knows it.
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To be mistaken in believing that the Christian religion is true is no great loss to anyone but how dreadful to be mistaken in believing it to be false!
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The state of man is inconstancy, ennui, anxiety.
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Man is so made that by continually telling him he is a fool he believes it, and by continually telling it to himself he makes himself believe it. For man holds an inward talk with himself, which it pays him to regulate.
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The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.
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What matters it that man should have a little more knowledge of the universe? If he has it, he gets little higher. Is he not always infinitely removed from the end, and is not the duration of our life equally removed from eternity, even if it lasts ten years longer?
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Our imagination so magnifies this present existence, by the power of continual reflection on it, and so attenuates eternity, by not thinking of it at all, that we reduce an eternity to nothingness, and expand a mere nothing to an eternity and this habit is so inveterately rooted in us that all the force of reason cannot induce us to lay it aside.
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Do they think that they have given us great pleasure by telling us that they hold our soul to be no more than wind or smoke, and saying it moreover in tones of pride and satisfaction? Is this then something to be said gaily? Is it not on the contrary something to be said sadly, as being the saddest thing in the world?
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The multitude which is not brought to act as a unity, is confusion. That unity which has not its origin in the multitude is tyranny.
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God only pours out his light into the mind after having subdued the rebellion of the will by an altogether heavenly gentleness which charms and wins it.
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If you do not love too much, you do not love enough.
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On the occasions when I have pondered over men's various activities, the dangers and worries they are exposed to at Court or at war, from which so many quarrels, passions, risky, often ill-conceived actions and so on are born, I have often said that man's unhappiness springs from one thing alone, his incapacity to stay quietly in one room.
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All our reasoning boils down to yielding to sentiment.
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Voluptuousness, like justice, is blind, but that is the only resemblance between them.
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When everyone is moving towards depravity, no one seems to be moving, but if someone stops he shows up the others who are rushing on, by acting as a fixed point.
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No soul of high estate can take pleasure in slander. It betrays a weakness.
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The principles of pleasure are not firm and stable. They are different in all mankind, and variable in every particular with such a diversity that there is no man more different from another than from himself at different times.
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Force and not opinion is the queen of the world but it is opinion that uses the force. [Fr., La force est la reine du monde, et non pas l'opinion mais l'opinion est celle qui use de la force.]
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