··· Search Results ···

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

— Blaise Pascal, Pensées  <link>

God wishes to move the will rather than the mind. Perfect clarity would help the mind and harm the will.

— Blaise Pascal, Pensées  <link>

If there were no obscurity, man would not feel his corruption; if there were no light, man could not hope for a cure.

— Blaise Pascal, Pensées  <link>

There is always some advantage in making men love us. Human life is thus only a perpetual illusion; men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does of us in our absence. Human society is founded on mutual deceit.

— Blaise Pascal, Pensées  <link>

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

— Blaise Pascal, Pensées  <link>

Conspiracy Theory?

The hypothesis that the Apostles were knaves is quite absurd. Follow it out to the end and imagine these twelve men meeting after Jesus’s death and conspiring to say that he had risen from the dead. This means attacking all the powers that be.

The human heart is singularly susceptible to fickleness, to change, to promises, to bribery. One of them had only to deny his story under these inducements, or still more because of possible imprisonment, tortures and death, and they would all have been lost.

Follow that out.

— Blaise Pascal [via]  <link>