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
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter
The sensibility of man to trifles, and his insensibility to great things, indicates a strange inversion.
Le coeur a ses raisons dont le cerveau ne sait nul. T: 'The heart has its reasons, of which the mind knows nothing.'
Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature; but he is a thinking reed.
We make an idol of truth itself, for truth apart from charity is not God, but his image and an idol that we must not love or worship.
Force rules the world, and not opinion; but opinion is that which makes use of force
This religion taught to her children what men have only been able to discover by their greatest knowledge.
Two kinds of persons know Him: those who have a humble heart, and who love lowliness, whatever kind of intellect they may have, high or low; and those who have sufficient understanding to see the truth, whatever opposition they may have to it.
Who would desire to have for a friend a man who talks in this fashion? Who would choose him out from others to tell him of his affairs? Who would have recourse to him in affliction? And indeed to what use in life could one put him?
What is man in nature? Nothing in relation to the infinite, all in relation to nothing, a mean between nothing and everything
Two extremes: to exclude reason, to admit reason only.
Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.
People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered themselves than by those found by others.
I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.