Blaise Pascal Quotes

Everybody is God. Everybody is the devil. And if you don't realize you have both parts, that's what really causes problems.

No one is immune to temptation. Not even a hero. Not even a nobody. Not even people like you and me. Lust is never very far away. And just when you least expect it, there it is again.

Christianity has such a contemptible opinion of human nature that it does not believe a man can tell the truth unless frightened by a belief in god. No lower opinion of the human race has ever been expressed.

The Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless human baby, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child. The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as this truth of the Incarnation.

If Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to human destiny. Well, I can say that, pessimistic as to human destiny, I am optimistic as to man.

The tragedy of being both rational and animal seems to consist in having to choose between duty and desire rather than in making any particular choice

Countless are, as the sand in the sea, the deep desires of men, and none resembles the other, and all of them, whether shameful, or great, in the beginning are obedient, but later become terrible masters over him.

St. Augustine teaches us that there is in each man a Serpent, an Eve, and an Adam. Our senses and natural propensities are the Serpent; the excitable desire is the Eve; and reason is the Adam. Our nature tempts us perpetually; criminal desire is often excited; but sin is not completed till reason consents.

For two thousand years Christianity has been telling us: life is death, death is life; it is high time to consult the dictionary.

A large portion of human beings live not so much in themselves as in what they desire to be. They create what is called an ideal character, in an ideal form, whose perfections compensate in some degree for the imperfections of their own.

The incarnation is “a kind of vast joke whereby the Creator of the ends of the earth comes among us in diapers Until we too have taken the idea of the God-man seriously enough to be scandalized by it, we have not taken it as seriously as it demands to be taken.

The fall of man is written in too legible characters not to be understood: Those that deny it, by their denying, prove it.

Ye whose clay-cold heads and luke-warm hearts can argue down or mask your passions--tell me, what trespass is it that man should have them?... If nature has so wove her web of kindness, that some threads of love and desire are entangled with the piece--must the whole web be rent in drawing them out?

As soon as one promises not to do something, it becomes the one thing above all others that one most wishes to do.

It’s strange,” Moominmamma thought. “Strange that people can be sad, and even angry because life is too easy. But that’s the way it is, I suppose. The only thing to do is to start life afresh.

The self forms at the edge of desire, and a science of self arises in the effort to leave that self behind.

Man is a mixture of desires that extend beyond his knowledge and often result in action conflicting with rationality.

Which is scarier-- lust or temptation?

While man's desires and aspirations stir he cannot choose but err.

What is human in me is not what is best in me. What is human in me is that I desire, and to obtain what I desire, I believe I would crush anything that stood in my way.

Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.

I'm not afraid to play the role of Christian Grey. Because I'm not like him. But I perfectly understand him. I never thought that he was a monster. He is simply woven from desires. As every one of us.

We are kept out of the Garden by our own fear and desire in relation to what we think to be the goods of our life.

What can the will do when the heart commands?