Pensées

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

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.

Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it.

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of... We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart.

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

True eloquence makes light of eloquence, true morality makes light of morality.

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.

The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.

A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything.

Our reason is always deceived by fickle shadows; nothing can fix the finite between the two Infinites, which both enclose and fly from it.

The imagination disposes of everything; it makes beauty, justice, and happiness, which is everything in the world.

We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others.

It is a monstrous thing to see in the same heart and at the same time this sensibility to trifles and this strange insensibility to the greatest objects.

The only thing which consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries.

Faith is different from proof; the one is human, the other is a gift of God.

Custom is the source of our strongest and most believed proofs.

The external must be joined to the internal to obtain anything from God.

Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light is throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.

If we submit everything to reason our religion will be left with nothing mysterious or supernatural. If we offend the principles of reason our religion will be absurd and ridiculous . . . There are two equally dangerous extremes: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason.