Blaise Pascal

"Everything is duty, even love."

"If men knew themselves, God would heal and pardon them."

"The more I see of the world, the more I am convinced that I will never see a man whom I can really love."

"One must know oneself. If that does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life."

"The misery of mankind is so great that a man may almost boast if he is not unhappy."

"Do you wish people to think well of you? Don't speak well of yourself."

"We never live; we are always in the expectation of living."

"There is nothing we like to give so much as advice, and we are never averse to receiving it."

"All evil comes from man's being unable to sit still in a room."

"The strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his occasional exertions, but by his habitual actions."

"If you gain the whole world but lose yourself, what good is it?"

"The miserable have no other medicine but only hope."

"Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth."

"The climate is becoming a slave, subject to the whims of his master."

"Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural?"

"The greatest truths are the simplest things in the world, simple as your own breath."

"A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still."

"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects."

"When we are not too much occupied with the cares of life, we can find time for studying and pursuing philosophy."

"The more intelligent a man is, the more originality he will discover in men. Ordinary people see no difference between men."

"All of man's troubles come from his not knowing how to sit quietly in his room."

"To understand a man, you must understand at least the subject which occupies his thoughts when he is alone."

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

"The heart is ever the dupe of the understanding."

"We are so presumptuous that we wish to be known by all the world, even by people who will come after we are gone."

"Knowing God without knowing one's own misery leads to pride."

"It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason."

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that very existence of that world is a form of freedom."

"There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man which cannot be satisfied by any created thing but only by God the Creator."

"The will is never free in the sense that philosophers use the term."