Blaise-ing Beyond The Boundaries of Banality

1. Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.
2. Unless we love the truth we cannot know it.
3. Nothing is as approved as mediocrity, the majority has established it and it fixes its fangs on whatever gets beyond it either way.
4. We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves.
5. We never do evil so effectually as when we are led to do it by a false principle of conscience.
6. Nothing is more dastardly than to act with bravado toward God.
7. God only pours out his light into the mind after having subdued the rebellion of the will by an altogether heavenly gentleness which charms and wins it.
8. Christian piety annihilates the egoism of the heart; worldly politeness veils and represses it.
9. The power of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special efforts, but by his ordinary doing.
10. God instituted prayer to communicate to creatures the dignity of causality.
11. Man is nothing but insincerity, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in regard to himself and in regard to others. He does not wish that he should be told the truth, he shuns saying it to others; and all these moods, so inconsistent with justice and reason, have their roots in his heart.
12. The more I see of mankind, the more I prefer my dog.
13. Nature has perfections, in order to show that she is the image of God; and defects, to show that she is only his image.
14. Not only do we know God through Jesus Christ, we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ.
15. All the maxims have been written. It only remains to put them into practice.