Blaise Pascal Quotes

There are two things that are infinite: The universe and human folly. And sometimes I am not sure about the universe.

Of power does Man possess no particle: Of knowledge-just so much as show that still It ends in ignorance on every side.

All that mankind has ever learned is nothing more than a single grain of sand on a beach that reaches to infinity.

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

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

Calculate what man knows and it cannot compare to what he doesn't know. Calculate the time he is alive and it cannot compare to the time before he was born. Yet man takes something so small and tries to exhaust the dimensions of something so large!

The Secret of the Occult Sciences is that of Nature itself, the Secret of the generation of the Angels and Worlds, that of the Omnipotence of God .

The scariest part of forever is that nothing is.

Whatever you love opens its secrets to you.

The source of man's unhappiness is his ignorance of Nature.

There is very seldom any true secret.

A library is infinity under a roof.

We all love to hear a good story. We save our stories in books. We save our books in libraries. Libraries are the storyhouses full of all those stories and secrets.

Let us, then, take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the infinite. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature.

All her knowledge is gone now. Everything she ever learned, or heard, or saw. Her particular way of looking at Hamlet or daisies or thinking about love, all her private intricate thoughts, her inconsequential secret musings – they’re gone too. I heard this expression once: Each time someone dies, a library burns. I’m watching it burn right to the ground.

many things I knew, I have forgotten; many things I thought I knew, I find I know nothing about; some things I know, I have found not worth knowing; and some things I would give - O what would one not give to know? are beyond the reach of human ken.

The secret is not to betray your ignorance. Just maneuver, avoid the quicksands and obstacles, and the rest can be found in a dictionary.

The last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it.

Nature does not reveal all her secrets at once. We imagine we are initiated in her mysteries: we are, as yet, but hanging around her outer courts.

Even great spirits have only their five-fingers' breadth of experience - just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity begins.

The truth of Nature is a part of the truth of God; to him who does not search it out, darkness; to him who does, infinity.

All that stock of arguments [the skeptics] produce to depreciate our faculties, and make mankind appear ignorant and low, are drawn principally from this head, to wit, that we are under an invincible blindness as to the true and real nature of things.

I believe that our own experience instructs us that the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil.

Life is filled with secrets. You can't learn them all at once.