Blaise Pascal: Citations en anglais (Page 4)

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

“Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. Love still stands when all else has fallen.”

“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?”

“Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.”

“Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.”

“The more I see of Mankind, the more I prefer my dog.”

“There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.”

“Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.”

“In difficult times carry something beautiful in your heart.”

“Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for miseries and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.”

“And is it not obvious that, just as it is a crime to disturb the peace when truth reigns, it is also a crime to remain at peace when the truth is being destroyed?”

“The last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it.”

“Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.”

“Nature has made all her truths independent of one another. Our art makes one dependent on the other.”

“Symmetry is what we see at a glance; based on the fact that there is no reason for any difference…”

“Lust is the source of all our actions, and humanity.”

“By space the universe encompasses me and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.”

“The manner in which,, and Salomon de Tultie wrote, is the most usual, the most suggestive, the most remembered, and the oftener quoted; because it is entirely composed of thoughts born from the common talk of life.”

“Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.”