Take comfort: you would not be seeking me if you…
Quote
Take comfort: you would not be seeking me if you had not found me.
Original text
Console-toi, tu ne me chercherais pas si tu ne m’avais trouvé.
The story behind this quote
The sentence is taken from “The Mystery of Jesus”, one of the most personal fragments of the Pensées. Pascal meditates there on Christ’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane: Jesus “seeing all his friends asleep and all his enemies watchful” and tearing himself away from them “to enter into the agony”. Then Jesus himself speaks and addresses the soul that seeks him. After these words, he adds: “I was thinking of you in my agony; I shed such drops of blood for you.”
The meaning lies in a reversal: one does not seek God by one’s own strength; one seeks him because he has already given himself. The believer’s restlessness is already a sign of grace, an idea that comes from Saint Augustine.
Pascal had experienced a night of conversion in November 1654, recorded in the Memorial sewn into his clothing; this fragment is written in the same spirit. The sentence has become one of the most quoted in Christian spirituality, sometimes in the form “you would not be seeking me if you had not already found me”.
The source
Pensées, “The Mystery of Jesus”
Original text checked word for word in the work; the translation is by quotesay.
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Author
Blaise Pascal
A precocious mathematician and physicist who built one of the first calculating machines, Blaise Pascal later turned to religious and moral reflection. His Pensées, published after his death in 1670, are the fragments of an unfinished defence of Christianity.
Quotes by Blaise Pascal