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 a soldier complains of his hard life (or a labourer, etc.) try giving him nothing to do.
Each man is everything to himself, for with his death everything is dead for him. That is why each of us thinks he is everything to everyone. We must not judge nature by ourselves, but by its own standards.
Nature has perfections, in order to show that she is the image of God; and defects, to show that she is only his image.
Fuller believed human societies would soon rely mainly on renewable sources of energy, such as solar- and wind-derived electricity,. envisioned an age of "universal education and sustenance of all humanity". "The heart has reasons that reason does not understand."
The heart has its reasons, which Reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things. It is the heart which feels God, and not Reason. This, then, is perfect faith: God felt in the heart.
When a natural discourse paints a passion or an effect, one feels within oneself the truth of what one reads, which was there before, although one did not know it. Hence one is inclined to love him who makes us feel it, for he has not shown us his own riches, but ours. ...such community of intellect that we have with him necessarily inclines the heart to love.
The state of man is inconstancy, ennui, anxiety.
Extremes are for us as though they were not, and we are not within their notice. They escape us, or we them. This is our true state; this is what makes us incapable of certain knowledge and of absolute ignorance... This is our natural condition, and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses.
I know whom I have believed.
Now, if the passions had no hold on us, a week and a hundred years would amount to the same.
La vraie e loquence se moque de l'e loquence, la vraie morale se moque de la morale. True eloquence has notime foreloquence, true morality has no time for morality.
What a chimaera then is man, what a novelty, what a monster, what chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, yet an imbecile earthworm; depository of truth, yet a sewer of uncertainty and error; pride and refuse of the universe. Who shall resolve this tangle?
When I consider the small span of my life absorbed in the eternity of all time, or the small part of space which I can touch or see engulfed by the infinite immensity of spaces that I know not and that know me not, I am frightened and astonished to see myself here instead of there … now instead of then.
The more I see of Mankind, the more I prefer my dog.