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
Let each of us examine his thoughts
I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
All of our miseries prove our greatness. They are the miseries of a dethroned monarch.
Nothing is as approved as mediocrity, the majority has established it and it fixes it fangs on whatever gets beyond it either way.
Wisdom leads us back to childhood.
Truly it is an evil to be full of faults; but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and to be unwilling to recognize them, since that is to add the further fault of a voluntary illusion.
The only shame is to have none.
Atheism shows strength of mind, but only to a certain degree.
We must keep our thought secret, and judge everything by it, while talking like the people.
A little thing comforts us because a little thing afflicts us.
We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves.
Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness... and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him.
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!
Desire and force between them are responsible for all our actions; desire causes our voluntary acts, force our involuntary.