Blaise Pascal Quotes

The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

Some like to understand what they believe in. Others like to believe in what they understand.

All our knowledge falls with the bounds of experience.

Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.

There are few things reason can discover with so much certainty and ease as its own insufficiency.

History is like self-reflection through the medium of language propelling itself into self-recognition.

The farther reason looks the greater is the haze in which it loses itself.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

One of the worst muddles of this age is its confusing of the ideas behind combative and cognitive activity. Cognition is not fighting, but once someone knows a lot, he will have much to fight for.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind

To be ignorant of what occurred before you is to always remain a child.

History is philosophy teaching by examples.

Happy is the one who knows the causes of things.

History and philosophy are the two eyes of wisdom. If one of them is missing, then one only has half vision.

Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory and the second philosophy

Such a man, truly wise, creams off Nature leaving the sour and the dregs for philosophy and reason to lap up.

Macaulay somewhere says, that it is extraordinary that, whereas the laws of the motions of the heavenly bodies, far removed as they are from us, are perfectly well understood, the laws of the human mind, which are under our observation all day and every day, are no better understood than they were two thousand years ago.

We do not act because we know, but we know because we are called upon to act; the practical reason is the root of all reason.

You're chained to you reason ... Understanding is only a very small affair, so very small

No one understands eternity. One simply recognizes its existence.

This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.

The object of knowledge is what exists and its function to know about reality.

To understand possible means to understand impossible.