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
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.
Orthodoxy on one side of the Pyrenees may be heresy on the other.
Men seek rest in a struggle against difficulties; and when they have conquered these, rest becomes insufferable.
When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.
Not only do we know God through Jesus Christ, we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ.
Passion cannot be beautiful without excess; one either loves too much or not enough.
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.]
People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come in to the mind of others.
Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.
Through space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; through thought I comprehend the world.
Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them.