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
If you want to be a real seeker of truth, you need to, at least once in your lifetime, doubt in, as much as it's possible, in everything.
Unless we love the truth we cannot know it.
It is the conduct of God, who disposes all things kindly, to put religion into the mind by reason, and into the heart by grace.
Who knows if this other half of life where we think we're awake is not another sleep a little different from the first.
Who dispenses reputation? Who makes us respect and revere persons, works, laws, the great? Who but this faculty of imagination? All the riches of the earth are inadequate without its approval.
Thinking too little about things or thinking too much both make us obstinate and fanatical.
The imagination enlarges little objects so as to fill our souls with a fantastic estimate; and, with rash insolence, it belittles the great to its own measure, as when talking of God.
That which makes us go so far for love is that we never think that we might have need of anything besides that which we love.
Silence is the greatest persecution; never do the saints keep themselves silent.
Put the world's greatest philosopher on a plank that is wider than need be; if there is a precipe below, although his reason may convince him that he is safe, his imagination will prevail.
Man is so made that if he is told often enough that he is a fool he believes it.
Man is so made that by continually telling him he is a fool he believes it, and by continually telling it to himself he makes himself believe it. For man holds an inward talk with himself, which it pays him to regulate.
The truth about nature we discover with our brains. The truth about religion we discover with our hearts.
The entire ocean is affected by a single pebble.