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
The exterior must be joined to the interior to obtain anything from God, that is to say, we must kneel, pray with the lips, and soon, in order that proud man, who would not submit himself to God, may be now subject to the creature.
As we speak of poetical beauty, so ought we to speak of mathematical beauty and medical beauty. But we do not do so; and that reason is that we know well what is the object of mathematics, and that it consists in proofs, and what is the object of medicine, and that it consists in healing. But we do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry.
You gave me health that I might serve you; and so often I failed to use my good health in your service. Now you send me sickness in order to correct me Grant that, having ignored the things of spirit when my body was vigorous, I may now enjoy spiritual sweetness while my body groans with pain.
Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too.
We must know where to doubt, where to feel certain, where to submit. He who does not do so, understands not the force of reason.
Whilst in speaking of human things, we say that it is necessary to know them before we love can them...the saints on the contrary say in speaking of divine things that it is necessary to love them in order to know them, and that we only enter truth through charity.
Seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied.
We desire truth, and find within ourselves only uncertainty. We seek happiness, and find only misery and death. We cannot but desire truth and happiness, and are incapable of certainty or happiness.
The last thing that we find in making a book is to know what we must put first.
Most of the evils of life arise from man's being unable to sit still in a room.
If a man loves a woman for her beauty, does he love her? No; for the smallpox, which destroys her beauty without killing her, causes his love to cease. And if any one loves me for my judgment or my memory, does he really love me? No; for I can lose these qualities without ceasing to be.
If man should commence by studying himself, he would see how impossible it is to go further.
Extremes are for us as if they were not, and as if we were not in regard to them; they escape from us, or we from them.
Our imagination so magnifies this present existence, by the power of continual reflection on it, and so attenuates eternity, by not thinking of it at all, that we reduce an eternity to nothingness, and expand a mere nothing to an eternity; and this habit is so inveterately rooted in us that all the force of reason cannot induce us to lay it aside.