Blaise Pascal

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

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

However vast a man's spiritual resources, he is capable of but one great passion.

Our nature consists in movement; absolute rest is death.

When the passions become masters, they are vices.

Perfect clarity would profit the intellect but damage the will.

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.

There are two types of mind . . . the mathematical, and what might be called the intuitive. The former arrives at its views slowly, but they are firm and rigid; the latter is endowed with greater flexibility and applies itself simultaneously to the diverse lovable parts of that which it loves.

Reverend Fathers, my letters did not usually follow each other at such close intervals, nor were they so long. , , , This one would not be so long had I but the leisure to make it shorter.