Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
Blaise Pascal
All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.
The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.
Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much.
Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.
In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't.
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.
Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.
Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.
Noble deeds that are concealed are most esteemed.
You always admire what you really don't understand.
Man's greatness lies in his power of thought.
Love has reasons which reason cannot understand.
Human beings must be known to be loved; but Divine beings must be loved to be known.
All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room.
We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.
Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.
Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.
I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.
There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.
Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.
Faith is different from proof; the latter is human, the former is a Gift from God.
The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.
If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.
We know the truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart.
Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.
If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then, without hesitation, that He exists.
Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.
The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.
The strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts.
If all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.
The weather and my mood have little connection. I have my foggy and my fine days within me; my prosperity or misfortune has little to do with the matter.
It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.
Jesus is the God whom we can approach without pride and before whom we can humble ourselves without despair.
Do you wish people to think well of you? Don't speak well of yourself.
Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves.
People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered themselves than by those found by others.
It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.
When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before.
People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come in to the mind of others.
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?
Little things console us because little things afflict us.
There are two kinds of people one can call reasonable: those who serve God with all their heart because they know him, and those who seek him with all their heart because they do not know him.
Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.
Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.
The last act is bloody, however pleasant all the rest of the play is: a little earth is thrown at last upon our head, and that is the end forever.
The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.
Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.
Happiness is neither without us nor within us. It is in God, both without us and within us.
