Spiritual Quote of the Day (Blaise Pascal, on Grace)

"In the Christian religion, we find attributed to man, neither a debasement which renders him incapable of excellence, nor a holiness exempt from imperfection. No doctrine can be more suitable for man, than that which informs him of his twofold capability of receiving and losing grace, on account of the two extremes into which he is always in danger of falling—despair and pride.” —French philosopher, mathematician and logician Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), Pensees, translated by Isaac Taylor (1670)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Blaise Pascal, on Humanity’s Lack of Vision)

“For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in regard to the infinite, a whole in regard to nothing, a mean between nothing and the whole; infinitely removed from understanding either extreme. The end of things and their beginnings are invincibly hidden from him in impenetrable secrecy, he is equally incapable of seeing the nothing whence he was taken, and the infinite in which he is engulfed.”—French philosopher and logician Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), Pensées (Thoughts), translated by Charles Kegan Paul (1901)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Blaise Pascal, on Why Jesus Suffered and Died)

“Let us, then, consider death in Jesus Christ, and not without Jesus Christ. Without Jesus Christ it is horrible, detestable, the horror of nature. In Jesus Christ it is altogether different; it is benignant, holy, the joy of the faithful. Everything is sweet in Jesus Christ, even to death: Jesus Christ suffered and died to sanctify death and suffering; he has been all that was great, and all that was abject, in order to sanctify in himself all things except sin, and to be the model of every condition.” —French philosopher and logician Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), letter of Oct. 17, 1651, to “Madame Perier and Her Husband, on the Death of M. Pascal, Pere,” in The Thoughts, Letters, and Opuscules of Blaise Pascal, translated by O.W. Wight (1869)

(The image accompanying this post is Crucifixion, by German 16th-century painter Peter Gertner.)

Quote of the Day (Blaise Pascal, on the Approach to God)

“Jesus Christ is a God to whom we approach without pride, and before whom we are humbled without despair.”—French philosopher and logician Blaise Pascal (1623–1662, Pensees (Thoughts on Religion and Philosophy), translated by Isaac Taylor

Quote of the Day (Blaise Pascal, on the Magnitude of ‘The Smallest Act of Charity’)

“All bodies together, and all spirits together, and all that they can produce, are of less value than the smallest act of charity, because this is of an infinitely higher order.”—French mathematician and Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Pensees (1669)

Quote of the Day (Blaise Pascal, on the ‘Greatness and Wretchedness of Man’)

“The greatness and the wretchedness of man are so evident that the true religion must necessarily teach us both that there is in man some great source of greatness and a great source of wretchedness. It must then give us a reason for these astonishing contradictions.”— Blaise Pascal, Pensees, translated by W. F. Trotter (1670)

Quote of the Day (Blaise Pascal, on Nature as the Image of God)

“Nature has perfections, in order to show that she is the image of God; and defects, in order to show that she is only His image.” ―French mathematician/Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) quoted in Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical, compiled by C.N. Douglas (1917)

Quote of the Day (Pascal)

“When we come across a natural style, we are surprised and delighted; for we expected an author, and we find a man.”—Blaise Pascal