Blaise Pascal Quotes

As far as I'm concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.

I am not a hypocrite.

True eloquence makes light of eloquence. True morality makes light of morality.

If hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, piousness is virtue paying tribute to itself.

I'm not a virtue signaler.

At times, it appears easy to sermonise on morality and ethics. But morality and ethics appear good only when applied to others, never on oneself.

I have little time for sincerity.

The virtuous will be sure to speak uprightly; but those whose speech is upright may not be virtuous.

Common men talk bagfuls of religion but do not practise even a grain of it. The wise man speaks a little, even though his whole life is religion expressed in action.

Courage cannot be counterfeited. It is one virtue that escapes hypocrisy.

The more honesty a man has, the less he affects the air of a saint.

No lie can live forever.

Fewer possess virtue, than those who wish us to believe that they possess it.

I felt it was my duty to praise all of God's works with fervent enthusiasm. At the same time I killed flies in my house in a spirit of hatred, exasperation and contempt. My praise to God for all his works was dishonest, the act of killing the fly was honest.

You should not live one way in private, another in public.

For many wish not so much to be, as to seem to be, endowed with real virtue.

Our happiness often depends upon social hypocrisies to which we will never stoop.

People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us... It's people who claim that they're good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.

There's often a distressing disconnect between the good words we speak and the way we live our lives. In personal relations and politics, the mass media, the academy and organized religion, our good words tend to float away even as they leave our lips, ascending to an altitude where they neither reflect nor connect with the human condition. We long for words like love, truth, and justice to become flesh and dwell among us. But in our violent world, it's risky business to wrap our frail flesh around words like those, and we don't like the odds.

The existence of hypocrites does not prove the non-existence of true believers.

I have always considered "Pascal's Wager" a questionable bet to place. Any God worth "believing in" would surely prefer an honest agnostic to a calculating hypocrite.

The first great requisite is absolute sincerity. Falsehood and disguise are miseries and misery-makers.

A false man found a religion? Why, a false man cannot build a brick house!

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.

A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.