I. Frost's Selected Quotations

Everything at Amazon by and about: Blaise Pascal

Faith embraces many truths which seem to contradict each other.

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.

Continuous eloquence wearies.

The heart has its own reason which reason does not know.

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't.

Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

However vast a man's spiritual resources, he is capable of but one great passion.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Little things console us because little things afflict us.

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?

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason.

Perfect clarity would profit the intellect but damage the will.

It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.

Too much and too little wine. Give him none, he cannot find truth; give him too much, the same.

Reason is the slow and torturous method by which those who do not know the truth discover it.

Thus we never live, but we hope to live; and always disposing ourselves to be happy, it is inevitable that we never become so.

Rivers are highways that move on, and bear us whither we wish to go.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

The charm of fame is so great that we like every object to which it is attached, even death.

Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much.

To go beyond the bounds of moderation is to outrage humanity

We must learn our limits. We are all something, but none of us are everything.

It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.

We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike.

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

Does one need to love? Don't ask - feel it.

There is a God-shaped vacuum in every heart

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

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it.

Man's greatness lies in his power of thought.

When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing.

All the principles of sceptics, stoics, atheists, etc., are true. But their conclusions are false, because the opposite principles are also true.

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

Reason's last step it the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it.

Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.

We know the truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart.

The sole cause of man's unhappiness is the he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.

Faith is different from proof; the latter is human, the former is a Gift from God.

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

In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.

We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.

If all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.

People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered themselves than by those found by others.

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.

You always admire what you really don't understand.

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.

Had Cleopatra's nose been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been different.

When the passions become masters, they are vices.