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.
We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves.
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.
We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike.
Mediocrity makes the most of its native possessions.
they do not know that they seek only the chase and not the quarry.
Just as I do not know where I came from, so I do not know where I am going. All I know is that when I leave this world I shall fall forever into oblivion, or into the hands of an angry God, without knowing which of the two will be my lot for eternity. Such is my state of mind, full of weakness and uncertainty. The only conclusion I can draw from all this is that I must pass my days without a thought of trying to find out what is going to happen to me.
Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.