Q0392

Blaise Pascal

A verified English rendering from the curated archive.

English

All of humanity’s misfortune comes from one thing: not knowing how to remain quietly in a room.
Thinker Blaise Pascal
School Proto-Existential Christian Thought
Source Pensées (common numbering)
Theme Philosophy
Another quotation More from this thinker

Source context

This English passage is associated with Pensées (common numbering), within the tradition of Proto-Existential Christian Thought. The wording below is a verified rendering prepared for careful reading rather than a claim of unique translation authority.

A short reading

Read in the register of philosophy, the sentence asks the reader to test an assumption rather than to collect a slogan. In Blaise Pascal's wider work, similar claims are usually offered as prompts for judgment: what would have to be true for the sentence to hold, and what would follow if it did?

How to cite this quotation

APA: Blaise Pascal. (n.d.). All of humanity’s misfortune comes from one thing: not knowing how to remain quietly in a room. In Philosophy Blind Box. https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0392

MLA: Blaise Pascal. “All of humanity’s misfortune comes from one thing:….” Philosophy Blind Box, https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0392.

Chicago: Blaise Pascal. “All of humanity’s misfortune comes from one thing:….” Philosophy Blind Box. Accessed 2026. https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0392.

Same thinker

More from Blaise Pascal

  1. The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.
  2. Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature; but he is a thinking reed.
  3. All our dignity consists, then, in thought.
  4. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.
  5. All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

All quotations by Blaise Pascal

Same theme

More on philosophy

  1. It is through wonder that people both now begin and first began to philosophize.
  2. A person's character is their destiny.
  3. What is opposed brings together; from what differs comes the finest harmony.
  4. Death is nothing to us: for what has been dissolved has no sensation, and what has no sensation is nothing to us.
  5. Pleasure is the beginning and end of the happy life — not the pleasures of profligates, but freedom from pain in the body and from disturbance in the soul.

Browse the philosophy theme