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
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.
Do you wish people to speak well of you? Then do not speak at all yourself. [Fr., Voulez-vous qu'on croie du bien de vous? N'en dites point.]
There are people who lie simply for the sake of lying.
We must keep our thought secret, and judge everything by it, while talking like the people.
The sole cause of all human misery is the inability of people to sit quietly in their rooms.
We must make good people wish that the Christian faith were true, and then show that it is.
Nothing is surer than that the people will be weak.
That something so obvious as the vanity of the world should be so little recognized that people find it odd and surprising to be told that it is foolish to seek greatness; that is most remarkable.
The more intelligence one has, the more people one finds original. Commonplace people see no difference between men.
You always admire what you really don't understand.
People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.
There are two kinds of people one can call reasonable: those who serve God with all their heart because they know him, and those who seek him with all their heart because they do not know him.
Il n'y a que deux sortes d'hommes: les uns justes, qui se croient pe cheurs; les autres pe cheurs, qui se croient justes. There are only two types of people: the virtuous who believe themselves to be sinners and the sinners who believe themselves to be virtuous.
We are not satisfied with real life; we want to live some imaginary life in the eyes of other people and to seem different from what we actually are.