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 must know where to doubt, where to feel certain, where to submit. He who does not do so, understands not the force of reason.
Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too.
Vanity is but the surface.
If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?
However vast a man's spiritual resources, he is capable of but one great passion.
Brave deeds are wasted when hidden.
We are so presumptuous that we should like to be known all over the world, even by people who will only come when we are no more. Such is our vanity that the good opinion of half a dozen of the people around us gives us pleasure and satisfaction.
The exterior must be joined to the interior to obtain anything from God, that is to say, we must kneel, pray with the lips, and soon, in order that proud man, who would not submit himself to God, may be now subject to the creature.
Seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied.
We desire truth, and find within ourselves only uncertainty. We seek happiness, and find only misery and death. We cannot but desire truth and happiness, and are incapable of certainty or happiness.
There are vices which have no hold upon us, but in connection with others; and which, when you cut down the trunk, fall like the branches.
It is the contest that delights us, and not the victory.
Voluptuousness, like justice, is blind, but that is the only resemblance between them.
Civil wars are the greatest of evils. They are inevitable, if we wish to reward merit, for all will say that they are meritorious.