A drop of water could destroy you, yet you're greater than the universe that kills you
In his posthumously published Pensees, Blaise Pascal wrote that a human being is merely 'a reed, the most feeble thing in nature' — easily crushed by a vapor or a drop of water, utterly fragile against the vastness of the universe. But he argued humans remain nobler than the universe that destroys them, because a person knows they are dying, while the universe, however vast, knows nothing at all. Dignity, for Pascal, comes entirely from thought, not from physical strength or size.