When we are well we wonder what we would do if we were ill, but when w… — Pensées

Pensées — Blaise Pascal

When we are well we wonder what we would do if we were ill, but when we are ill we take medicine cheerfully; the illness persuades us to do so. We have no longer the passions and desires for amusements and promenades which health gave to us, but which are incompatible with the necessities of illness. Nature gives us, then, passions and desires suitable to our present state.[64] We are only troubled by the fears which we, and not nature, give ourselves, for they add to the state in which we are the passions of the state in which we are not.

Place: Part I, 1, 2, c. 1, section 4.[44] · ¶359
License: Public domain · Source
The text is given as in the edition, unedited.

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