Blaise Pascal Quotes

Risk is the sort of word that is easy to discuss upfront but tough to handle when it comes time to pay the piper. There will always be some who wimp out and second-guess when the pain hits, but that is a childish reaction.

I won't touch on risky, because that's subjective. People are just afraid of things too much. Afraid of things that don't necessarily merit fear.

We historians are increasingly using experimental psychology to understand the way we act. It is becoming very clear that our ability to evaluate risk is hedged by all sorts of cognitive biases. It's a miracle that we get anything right.

Some people feel affronted when something they thought to be true doesn't happen. If that's the case, then your sense of risk is much higher, and that leads to risk aversion. You need to be able to be comfortable in uncertainty.

There is often less danger in the things we fear than in the things we desire.

Men are eager to tread underfoot what they have once too much feared.

An emotion is an automatic response, an automatic effect of man's value premises. An effect, not a cause. There is no necessary clash, no dichotomy between man's reason and his emotions

I'm curious about what makes people do things that they do, unless it's absolutely terrifying to me.

At the approach of danger two voices speak with equal force in the heart of man: one very reasonably tells the man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of avoiding it and the other, even more reasonable, says that it is too painful and harassing to think of the danger... better to turn aside from the painful subject till it has come, and to think of what is pleasant. In solitude a man generally yields to the first voice; in society to the second.

By looking at the difference between perceived danger and actual danger, you can fundamentally change your reaction.

Fear is the most costly of all the human emotions, even though most fears have no foundation in fact.

Because of what I've chosen to do for my work in the world, almost every time that there's something that I'm afraid to do that I need to do, I have to do it in front of other people. It makes me feel exposed.

People change their habits. I know Americans who don't go to Paris because they think it is too dangerous.

Science can never grapple with the irrational. That is why it has no future before it, in this world.

Reason always stands in need of being purified by faith

Because we are human, because we are bound by gravity and the limitations of our bodies, because we live in a world where the news is often bad and the prospects disturbing, there is a need for another world somewhere, a world where Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers live.

Superstition sets the whole world in flames, but philosophy douses them.

I know that experts say you're more likely to get hurt crossing the street than you are flying, but that doesn't make me any less frightened of flying. If anything, it makes me more afraid of crossing the street.

By sort of combining the research of a lot of smart people, I came up with an equation for dread [dread=uncontrollability+unfamiliarity+imaginability+suffering+scale of destruction+unfairness]. The dread equation is a simplification, but it's a way to explain why we fear something so much when it is so unlikely. Part of it is the lack of control. That's why we're more scared of plane crashes than car crashes even though we know rationally which is more dangerous.

- Some men think because they are afraid to do. - There is a difference between fear and caution.

No disease of the imagination is so difficult to cure, as that which is complicated with the dread of guilt : fancy and conscience then act interchangeably upon us, and so often shift their places, that the illusions of one are not distinguished from the dictates of the other.

Fear is the most powerful enemy of reason.

I began to discriminate between fear and excitement. The two, though very close, are completely different. Fear is negative excitement, choking your imagination. Real excitement produces an energy that overcomes apprehension and makes you want to close in on your goal.

Shall I project a world?

Philosophy is the opposite of fairy tales