Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascalwas a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Christian philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by generalising the work of Evangelista Torricelli. Pascal also wrote in defence of the scientific method...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth19 June 1623
CityClermont-Ferrand, France
CountryFrance
When we would think of God, how many things we find which turn us away from Him, and tempt us to think otherwise. All this is evil, yet it is innate.
Men are so completely fools by necessity that he is but a fool in a higher strain of folly who does not confess his foolishness.
Evil is easily discovered; there is an infinite variety; good is almost unique. But some kinds of evil are almost as difficult to discover as that which we call good; and often particular evil of this class passes for good. It needs even a certain greatness of soul to attain to this, as to that which is good.
The last advance of reason is to recognize that it is surpassed by innumerable things; it is feeble if it cannot realize that.
Is it courage in a dying man to go, in weakness and in agony, to affront an almighty and eternal God?
Death itself is less painful when it comes upon us unawares than the bare contemplation of it, even when danger is far distant.
Death is easier to bear without thinking of it, than the thought of death without peril.
There are plenty of maxims in the world; all that remains is to apply them.
Those who make antitheses by forcing the sense are like men who make false windows for the sake of symmetry. Their rule is not to speak justly, but to make accurate figures.
Great and small suffer the same mishaps.
Instinct teaches us to look for happiness outside ourselves.
Continuity in everything is unpleasant.
All the dignity of man consists in thought. Thought is therefore by its nature a wonderful and incomparable thing. It must have strange defects to be contemptible. But it has such, so that nothing is more ridiculous. How great it is in its nature! How vile it is in its defects! But what is this thought? How foolish it is!
Admiration spoils all from infancy.