Blaise Pascal

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

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

It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.

It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.

Men never do evil so fully and so happily as when they do it for conscience's sake.

Men never do evil so fully and so happily as when they do it for conscience's sake.

Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may read more

Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.

Commemoration of Osmund, Bishop of Salisbury, 1099 What does this desire and this inability of ours proclaim to us read more

Commemoration of Osmund, Bishop of Salisbury, 1099 What does this desire and this inability of ours proclaim to us but that there was once in man a genuine happiness, of which nothing now survives but the mark and the empty outline; and this he vainly tries to fill from everything that lies around him, seeking from things that are not there the help that he does not get from those that are present? Yet they are quite incapable of filling the gap, because this infinite gulf can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object -- that is, God, Himself. He alone is man's veritable good, and since man has deserted Him it is a strange thing that there is nothing in nature that has not been capable of taking His place for man: stars, sky, earth, elements, plants, cabbages, leeks, animals, insects, calves, serpents, fever, plague, war, famine, vices, adultery, incest. And since he has lost the true good, everything can equally appear to him as such -- even his own destruction, though that is so contrary at once to God, to reason, and to nature.