Blaise Pascal

“By thought I embrace the universal.”

“If we let ourselves believe that man began with divine grace, that he forfeited this by sin, and that he can be redeemed only by divine grace through the crucified Christ then we shall find a peace of mind never granted to philosophers. He who cannot believe is cursed, for he reveals his unbelief that God has not chosen to give him grace.”

“Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.”  [Thoughts, Chap. ii. 10]

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

“Since we cannot know all that is to be known of everything, we ought to know a little about everything.”

“The heart has its reasons which reason does not understand.”

“The last thing that we find in making a book is to know what we must put first.”

“Vanity is so secure in the heart of man that everyone wants to be admired:  even I who write this, and you who read this.”

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

“What a chimera, then, is man! What a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! A judge of all things, feeble worm of the earth, depository of the truth, cloacae of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe!”

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