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
All the good maxims which are in the world fail when applied to one's self.
Force and not opinion is the queen of the world; but it is opinion that uses the force. [Fr., La force est la reine du monde, et non pas l'opinion; mais l'opinion est celle qui use de la force.]
Who confers reputation? who gives respect and veneration to persons, to books, to great men? Who but Opinion? How utterly insufficient are all the riches of the world without her approbation!
Too much pleasure disagrees with us. Too many concords are annoying in music; too many benefits irritate us; we wish to have the wherewithal to overpay our debts.
Orthodoxy on one side of the Pyrenees may be heresy on the other.
Opinion is, as it were, the queen of the world, but force is its tyrant.
Rivers are roads that move and carry us whither we wish to go. [Fr., Les rivieres sont des chemins qui marchant et qui portent ou l'on veut aller.]
The weakness of human reason appears more evidently in those who know it not than in those who know it.
The authority of reason is far more imperious than that of a master; for he who disobeys the one is unhappy, but he who disobeys the other is a fool.
Great and small suffer the same mishaps.
Instinct teaches us to look for happiness outside ourselves.
Meanings receive their dignity from words instead of giving it to them.
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!