Pensées

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it.

Il n'est pas certain que tout soit incertain. (Translation: It is not certain that everything is uncertain.)

Dull minds are never either intuitive or mathematical.

We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.

The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.

Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.

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

Le silence eternel des ces espaces infinis m'effraie - The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.

Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light is throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.

Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him: a vapour, a drop of water is enough to kill him. but even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows none of this.

Nature has made all her truths independent of one another. Our art makes one dependent on the other.

And if one loves me for my judgement, memory, he does not love me, for I can lose these qualities without losing myself. Where, then, is this Ego, if it be neither in the body nor in the soul? And how love the body or the soul, except for these qualities which do not constitute me, since they are perishable? For it is impossible and would be unjust to love the soul of a person in the abstract and whatever qualities might be therein. We never, then, love a person, but only qualities. Let us, then, jeer no more at those who are honoured on account of rank and office; for we love a person only on account of borrowed qualities.

Symmetry is what we see at a glance; based on the fact that there is no reason for any difference...

Lust is the source of all our actions, and humanity.

La dernière chose qu'on trouve en faisant un ouvrage est de savoir celle qu'il faut mettre la première. (The last thing one settles in writing a book is what one should put in first.)

When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which precedes and will succeed it—memoria hospitis unius diei praetereuntis (remembrance of a guest who tarried but a day)—the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? By whose command and act were this place and time allotted to me?

The manner in which Epictetus, Montaigne, and Salomon de Tultie wrote, is the most usual, the most suggestive, the most remembered, and the oftener quoted; because it is entirely composed of thoughts born from the common talk of life.

Atheists. What grounds have they for saying that no one can rise from the dead? Which is harder, to be born or to rise again? That what has never been should be, or that what has been should be once more? Is it harder to come into existence than to come back? Habit makes us find the one easy, while lack of habit makes us find the other impossible.

Those honor nature well, who teach that she can speak on everything.

Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it.

Men seek rest in a struggle against difficulties; and when they have conquered these, rest becomes insufferable.