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
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.
Curiosity is only vanity. Most frequently we wish not to know, but to talk. We would not take a sea voyage for the sole pleasure of seeing without hope of ever telling.
We like security: we like the pope to be infallible in matters of faith, and grave doctors to be so in moral questions so that we can feel reassured.
Any unity which doesn't have its origin in the multitudes is tyranny.
The multitude which is not brought to act as a unity, is confusion. That unity which has not its origin in the multitude is tyranny.