Blaise Pascal Quotes

We are not important to the universe. That's the bad news.

I'll go out at night and look up at the stars and think, 'How ridiculously inconsequential I am in the scheme of things.'

We are not significant on the cosmic scale.

I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn’t even matter if I existed at all.

The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.

One idea I explore in my stand-up show is whether, if you try looking at the universe rationally and avoid coping mechanisms like mysticism or religion, you can still be happy knowing you are going to die after a brief time on this spinning ball.

Imagining living in a universe without purpose may prepare us to better face reality head on. I cannot see that this is such a bad thing.

Why I came here, I know not; where I shall go it is useless to inquire - in the midst of myriads of the living and the dead worlds, stars, systems, infinity, why should I be anxious about an atom?

Man knows that the world is not made on a human scale; and he wishes that it were.

Nature hasn't gone anywhere. It is all around us, all the planets, galaxies and so on. We are nothing in comparison.

A man is a very small thing, and the night is very large and full of wonders.

Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'.

Often and often must he have thought, that, to be or not to be forever, was a question, which must be settled; as it is the foundation, and the only foundation upon which we feel that there can rest one thought, one feeling, or one purpose worthy of a human soul.

On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise.

What I see in science is a lot of imagination referring to things that are fundamental to what we are. Our cells, our history, our future, our place in the universe, our lack of place in the universe. That's poetry as far as I'm concerned.

Let man then contemplate the whole of nature in her full and grand majesty... No idea approaches it. We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.

Is it not better to intimate our astonishment as we pass through this world if it be only for a moment ere we are swallowed up in the yeast of the abyss? I will lift up my hands and say Kosmos.

The dizziness in the face of les espaces infinis--only overcome if we dare to gaze into them without any protection. And accept them as the reality before which we must justify our existence. For this is the truth we must reach to live, that everything is and we just in it.

Everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.

If I contemplate myself as part of the Universe: what am I?

It is easier to accept the message of the stars than the message of the salt desert. The stars speak of man's insignificance in the long eternity of time; the desert speaks of his insignificance right now.

If you ever start taking things too seriously, just remember that we are talking monkeys on an organic spaceship flying through the universe.

Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.

Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!

It's also hard for people to contend with the difficult possibility that we are simply overadvanced fungi and bacteria hurtling through a galaxy in cold, meaningless space. But just because our existence may have arisen unintentionally and without purpose doesn't preclude meaning or purpose from emerging as a result of our interaction and collaboration. Meaning may not be a precondition for humanity as much as a by-product of it.