Blaise Pascal: Quotes about nature

Discourses on the Condition of the Great
Context: This right which you have, is not founded any more than his upon any quality or any merit in yourself which renders you worthy of it. Your soul and your body are, of themselves, indifferent to the state of boatman or that of duke; and there is no natural bond that attaches them to one condition rather than to another.

Conversation on Epictetus and Montaigne
Context: If it is pleasing to observe in nature her desire to paint God in all his works, in which we see some traces of him because they are his images, how much more just is it to consider in the productions of minds the efforts which they make to imitate the essential truth, even in shunning it, and to remark wherein they attain it and wherein they wander from it, as I have endeavored to do in this study.

see St. Augustine, Civitate Dei, 1. XI, c. xxvi
The Art of Persuasion
Context: I would inquire of reasonable persons whether this principle: Matter is naturally wholly incapable of thought, and this other: I think, therefore I am, are in fact the same in the mind of Descartes, and in that of St. Augustine, who said the same thing twelve hundred years before.... I am far from affirming that Descartes is not the real author of it, even if he may have learned it only in reading this distinguished saint; for I know how much difference there is between writing a word by chance without making a longer and more extended reflection on it, and perceiving in this word an admirable series of conclusions, which prove the distinction between material and spiritual natures, and making of it a firm and sustained principle of a complete metaphysical system, as Descartes has pretended to do.... it is on this supposition that I say that this expression is as different in his writings from the saying in others who have said it by chance, as in a man full of life and strength, from a corpse.

C'est une maladie naturelle à l'homme de croire qu'il possède la vérité directement…
Section I
Variant translation: It is man's natural sickness to believe that he possesses the Truth.
On the Spirit of Geometry

Source: Pensées

Source: Pensées

Source: Pensées

Discourses on the Condition of the Great

Discourses on the Condition of the Great

Discourses on the Condition of the Great

The Art of Persuasion

The Art of Persuasion

Conversation on Epictetus and Montaigne

But is there less in the people of rank who live in so strange a forgetfulness of their natural condition?
Discourses on the Condition of the Great