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
Necessity, that great refuge and excuse for human frailty, breaks through all law; and he is not to be accounted in fault whose crime is not the effect of choice, but force.
The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.
We are usually convinced more easily by reasons we have found ourselves than by those which have occurred to others.
Amusement allures and deceives us and leads us down imperceptibly in thoughtlessness to the grave
Two similar faces, neither of which alone causes laughter, use laughter when they are together, by their resemblance.
It is man's natural sickness to believe that he possesses the Truth.
We never love a person, but only qualities.
If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.
Il n'est pas certain que tout soit incertain. (Translation: It is not certain that everything is uncertain.)
The pagans do not know God, and love only the earth. The Jews know the true God, and love only the earth. The Christians know the true God, and do not love the earth.
The captain of a ship is not chosen from those of the passengers who comes from the best family.
Christianity is strange. It bids man recognise that he is vile, even abominable, and bids him desire to be like God. Without such a counterpoise, this dignity would make him horribly vain, or this humiliation would make him terribly abject.
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?
Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.