Blaise Pascal Quotes

No human being is constituted to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition.

We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.

It is of no help to us that there is an absolute truth of the matter of things because unfortunately, none of us are in a position to say definitively what that is - although we all think that we are.

I assume that we are all limited by our own brains and experiences and can only understand other people and other creatures through a kind of translation that brings them closer to us.

Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.

I don't think I could tell the whole truth about anything. That's a pretty heavy burden, because we all just view the world through this little piece of coke bottle.

Perception and reality are two different things.

so mortals tend to see only what they can understand.

Truth is contrary to our nature, not so error, and this for a very simple reason: truth demands that we should recognize ourselves as limited, error flatters us that, in one way or another, we are unlimited.

Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost ... perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that little precious fragment as well.

Our senses don't deceive us: our judgment does

It is obvious that the great majority of humans throughout history have had grossly, even ridiculously, unrealistic concepts of the world. Man is, among many other things, the mistaken animal, the foolish animal. Other species doubtless have much more limited ideas about the world, but what ideas they do have are much less likely to be wrong and are never foolish. White cats do not denigrate black, and dogs do not ask Baal, Jehovah, or other Semitic gods to perform miracles for them.

Just because you believe it doesn't make it so.

Everything that happens is at least one dimension smaller than you've imagined it to be.

When we stand the truth on its head we generally fail to notice that our head is not standing where it should be standing either.

"Is," "is," "is" — the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment.

We do not see the lens through which we look.

Understanding' is merely the sum total of our misunderstandings.

We both know that, my friend, but a man's perception soon becomes his reality.

A thing is never seen as it really is.

She was reflecting back on a truth she had learned over the years: that people heard what they wanted to hear, saw what they wanted, believed what they wanted.

All you know is what you think you know, but that isn't always what's real.

All our knowledge originates in opinion.

Logic and truth are two very different things, but they often look the same to the mind that's performing the logic.