Quotes about Pascal

As Pascal wrote long ago, "Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.

As Pascal observed, when God addresses our human hearts, there is always enough light for those who desire to see, yet enough obscurity for those who do not wish to see. What makes the difference is the heart.

The world thinks men are good and saints are better. Pascal knows men are sinners and saints are miracles.

Truly it is an evil to be full of faults," said Pascal, "but it is a still greater evil to be full of them, and to be unwilling to recognize them.

People think of faith as being something that you don't really believe, a device in helping you believe simply it. Of course that is quite wrong. As Pascal says, faith is a gift of God. It is different from the proof of it. It is the kind of faith God himself places in the heart, of which the proof is often the instrument... He says of it, too, that it is the heart which is aware of God, and not reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not be reason.

Heard the Bible read two hours—Pascal one hour and a quarter—meditation one hour and a quarter…. Pitt called and commended Butler's Analogy—resolved to write to him, and discover to him what I am occupied about: this will save me much embarrassment, and I hope give me more command both of my time and conduct.

The sum of evil, Pascal remarked, would be much diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms.

We make an idol of truth itself; for truth apart from charity is not God, but his image and idol, which we must neither love nor worship. Pascal

These three people, Pascal, Blake, and Dostoyevsky, illustrate perfectly what I have long believed to be the case, that history consists of parables whereby God communicates in terms that the imagination rather than the mind, faith rather than knowledge, can grasp.

Down inside we have a longing for God-what Pascal called "the vacuum which God left behind".