Let no one say that I have said nothing new; the arrangement of the subject is new. When we play tennis, we both play with the same ball, but one of us places it better.

#Pensees

Nature has made all her truths independent of one another. Our art makes one dependent on the other. But this is not natural. Each keeps its own place.

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So, when they are all included in one, they are hidden and useless, as in a chest, and never appear save in their natural confusion. Nature has established them all without including one in the other.

#Pensees (3/3)

The last thing one settles in writing a book is what one should put in first.

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#Pensees (3/3)

For the chief malady of man is restless curiosity about things which he cannot understand; and it is not so bad for him to be in error as to be curious to no purpose.

#Pensees (2/2)

Rivers are roads which move, and which carry us whither we desire to go.

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#Pensees (5/5)

Eloquence is an art of saying things in such a way—(1) that those to whom we speak may listen to them without pain and with pleasure; (2) that they feel themselves interested, so that self-love leads them more willingly to reflection upon it.

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Eloquence, which persuades by sweetness, not by authority; as a tyrant, not as a king.

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And thus this benefit renders him pleasing to us, besides that such community of intellect as we have with him necessarily inclines the heart to love.

#Pensees (2/2)

One likes to see the error, the passion of Cleobuline, because she is unconscious of it. She would be displeasing, if she were not deceived.

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The doctor, who speaks for a quarter of an hour after he has said everything, so full is he of the desire of talking.

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Scaramouch, who only thinks of one thing.

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order that we may receive the same pleasures and the same sacrifices which we have seen so well represented in the theatre.

#Pensees (2/2)

and, at the same time, we make ourselves a conscience founded on the propriety of the feelings which we see there, by which the fear of pure souls is removed, since they imagine that it cannot hurt their purity to love with a love which seems to them so reasonable.

#Pensees (4/4)

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

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but one does not like to be mistaken, and that perhaps arises from the fact that man naturally cannot see everything, and that naturally he cannot err in the side he looks at, since the perceptions of our senses are always true.

#Pensees (3/3)

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

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