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 eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.
Apart from Jesus Christ, we do not know what is our life, nor our death, nor God, nor ourselves.
Who can doubt that we exist only to love? Disguise it, in fact, as we will, we love without intermission... We live not a moment exempt from its influence.
There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.
Those who write against vanity want the glory of having written well, and their readers the glory of reading well, and I who write this have the same desire, as perhaps those who read this have also.
I cannot judge my work while I am doing it. I have to do as painters do, stand back and view it from a distance, but not too great a distance. How great? Guess.
Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.
The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.
Most of man's trouble comes from his inability to be still.
Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.
Not to be mad is another form of madness
If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?
Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?
Let each of us examine his thoughts