Blaise Pascal quote

    O mankind, it is in vain that you seek within yourself the cure for your own miseries. All your insight only leads you to the knowledge that it is not in yourself that you will discover either truth or goodness. The philosophers made these promises, but they have failed to keep them. For they do not know what your true good is, nor what is your true state. How could they provide cures for ills they did not even recognize or diagnose? For your chief maladies are pride, which cuts you off from God; sensuality, which keeps you earth-bound; and all they have done is to keep at least one of these maladies forstered. If they have given you God for your object, it is only to pander to your pride. They have made you think that you are like Him and resemble God by your nature. And those who saw the vanity of such pretension have cast you down into that other abyss, by making you believe that your nature is like that of the beasts of the field, and have led you to seek your good in lust, which is the lot of the animals. – Blaise Pascal, The Mind on Fire
The Mind on Fire: An Anthology of the Writings of Blaise Pascal (Classics of Faith and Devotion)