Blaise Pascal Quotes

No two men see the world exactly alike, and different temperaments will apply in different ways a principle that they both acknowledge. The same man will, indeed, often see and judge the same things differently on different occasions.

Different men often see the same subject in different lights

We may try to see things as objectively as we please. None the less, we can never see them with any eyes except our own.

There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth.

A feeling is not a fact.

Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.

I also doubt a man can give really clear reasons for anything.

The art of music is good, for the reason, among others, that it produces pleasure; but what proof is it possible to give that pleasure is good? If, then, it is asserted that there is a comprehensive formula, including all things which are in themselves good, and that whatever else is good, is not so as an end, but as a mean, the formula may be accepted or rejected, but is not a subject of what is commonly understood by proof.

The difference is as great between The optics seeing as the objects seen. All manners take a tincture from our own; Or come discolor'd through out passions shown; Or fancy's beam enlarges, multiplies, Contracts, inverts, and gives ten thousand dyes.

The philosophical anthropologist ... can know the wholeness of the person and through it the wholeness of man only when he does not leave his subjectivity out and does not remain an untouched observer.

Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.

One person's enemy is another person's best friend. My favorite food might give you a rash.

For man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion.

There is no accounting for human beings.

I'm very interested in the question of how we perceive something, how consciousness goes from one thing, like looking at you in your black hat to what it might mean to my imagination and how I would draw that or write that, how I would subjectify you? It's something that is endlessly interesting to me.

Opinions can't be inaccurate.

There are some situations one simply cannot be neutral about, because when you are neutral you are an accomplice. Objectivity doesn't mean treating all sides equally. It means giving each side a hearing.

To judge a man means nothing more than to ask: What content does he give to the form of humanity? What concept should we have of humanity if he were its only representative?

If I sing "you broke my heart, you left me flat," everyone knows exactly what that means - they know the story. But if I sing a line that's plaintive or wailing, people can experience their own set of emotions and their own story. Each of us might give that phrase a different meaning. It's open to interpretation, and one song becomes a thousand songs. I love that.

Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

I don't want to tell what the songs are about for me, because then people can't decide for themselves, which is why I write; it's for you to find your own meaning in. For me it's my story, for someone else it's theirs; if I tell exactly what it means, then it's only my story.

Taste is such a changing thing. Every age our tastes change. But the things that really last aren't necessarily the best or the worst or the most loved things, but they're the things that make the biggest impression.

Just because it happened to you, doesn't mean it's interesting.

Anybody doing something brings something to it. It's not for me to say if it's "growth". Just by the nature of everyone has a different take on the material. Some people would.

The word realist means nothing to me, because I would subordinate reality to temperament. Give me what is true and I applaud; but give me what is individual and alive and I applaud even more.