Blaise Pascal Quotes

If man should commence by studying himself, he would see how impossible it is to go further.

This is...self-knowled ge-for a man to know what he knows, and what he does not know.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.

However fascinating you may think you are, there is a limit to what you can know about yourself.

I love to watch human beings figuring out their limitations.

but if I've learned anything, it's that we don't know half of what we think we do. And we know ourselves least of all.

The only subject I know anything about is myself and I don't know that too clearly.

I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.

I've always enjoyed people studying themselves in the mirror, and I also enjoy those 'walk and feel bad' shots. I like anything that isolates people and focuses them on themselves, or makes us focus on their faces as they're going through something.

What more powerful form of study of mankind could there be than to read our own instruction book?

Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

Maybe we can comprehend a flower or an insect, but we can never comprehend ourselves. Even less can we expect to comprehend the universe.

Make it thy business to know thyself, which is the most difficult lesson in the world. Yet from this lesson thou will learn to avoid the frog's foolish ambition of swelling to rival the bigness of the ox.

Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.

Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of the world. Today he is the thing he understands least.

I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.

I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous. And therefore I bid farewell to all this; the common opinion is enough for me. For, as I was saying, I want to know not about this, but about myself: am I a monster more complicated and swollen with passion than the serpent Typho, or a creature of a gentler and simpler sort, to whom Nature has given a diviner and lowlier destiny?

To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self.

The more I reflect and look back on the past, the more vividly do I feel my limitations.

He who knows himself properly can very soon learn to know all other men. It is all reflection.

To know oneself is to study oneself in action, which is relationship.

Man is a wonder to himself; he can neither govern nor know himself.

We almost always live outside ourselves, and life itself is a continual dispersion. But it's towards ourselves that we tend, as towards a centre around which, like planets, we trace absurd and distant ellipses.

Wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the sole subject we study and learn.

Everything is a subject; the subject is yourself. It is within yourself that you must look and not around you... The greatest happiness is to reveal it to others, to study oneself, to paint oneself continually in [one's] work.