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
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?
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.
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.
Mediocrity makes the most of its native possessions.
they do not know that they seek only the chase and not the quarry.
If they [Plato and Aristotle] wrote about politics it was as if to lay down rules for a madhouse. And if they pretended to treat it as something really important it was because they knew that the madmen they were talking to believed themselves to be kings and emperors. They humored these beliefs in order to calm down their madness with as little harm as possible.
Man's sensitivity to the little things and insensitivity to the greatest are the signs of a strange disorder.
Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.
Orthodoxy on one side of the Pyrenees may be heresy on the other.