Blaise Pascal

"Justice without strength is helpless; strength without justice is tyranny."

"A trifle consoles us because a trifle distresses us."

"The weather and my mood have little connection. I define myself by the life within me."

"If we must confess our faults, why is it we so rarely listen to those of others?"

"Solitude is a divine gift; loneliness is society's curse."

"The capacity to love is what separates the human from the merely living."

"Knowing oneself is the beginning of all wisdom."

"We never fully appreciate the present moment until it becomes the past."

"In all things, find the eternal within the temporal."

"Patience is harder to practice than any virtue, for it requires the death of pride."

"The true test of friendship is not time, but adversity."

"Custom is the law of nature; what nature has instituted custom enforces."

"Art is the response of man's creative soul to the beauty in the universe."

"We are born, live, and die among infinities and infinitesimals."

"Ambition feeds on the admiration of others; true worth feeds on itself."

"To live without philosophy is to live blind."

"The greatest teacher is time; the greatest student is the humble heart."

"We comfort ourselves by recounting our past, yet we suffer by anticipating our future."

"Small minds are concerned with extraordinary occurrences; great minds with ordinary ones."

"Love is nothing but the expression of one's own perfection."

"The only true wisdom is in knowing that you know nothing."

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

"The beauty of mathematics is that it reveals the mind of God."

"We should not be astonished at the marvels of nature, but rather at our own ignorance."

"Do not ask me if I am happy; ask me if I am virtuous."

"The greatest darkness is not the absence of light, but the absence of hope."

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

"A man should not feel ashamed to admit he has been in the wrong, which is but saying that he is wiser today than yesterday."

"The heart speaks a language reason cannot comprehend."

"All human evil comes from a single cause: man's inability to sit still in a room."