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
It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason.
Symmetry is what we see at a glance; based on the fact that there is no reason for any difference...
The manner in which Epictetus, Montaigne, and Salomon de Tultie wrote, is the most usual, the most suggestive, the most remembered, and the oftener quoted; because it is entirely composed of thoughts born from the common talk of life.
Those honor nature well, who teach that she can speak on everything.
Concupiscence and force are the source of all our actions; concupiscence causes voluntary actions, force involuntary ones.
Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?
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.
I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.
We are troubled only by the fears which we, and not nature, give ourselves.
Nothing is surer than that the people will be weak.
What amazes me the most is to see that everyone is not amazed at his own weakness.
We sometimes learn more from the sight of evil than from an example of good; and it is well to accustom ourselves to profit by the evil which is so common, while that which is good is so rare.
The married should not forget that to speak of love begets love.
You see, if the height of the mercury [barometer] column is less on the top of a mountain than at the foot of it (as I have many reasons for believing, although everyone who has so far written about it is of the contrary opinion), it follows that the weight of the air must be the sole cause of the phenomenon, and not that abhorrence of a vacuum, since it is obvious that at the foot of the mountain there is more air to have weight than at the summit, and we cannot possibly say that the air at the foot of the mountain has a greater aversion to empty space than at the top.