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
Eloquence; it requires the pleasant and the real; but the pleasant must itself be drawn from the true.
Let us now speak according to natural lights. If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible. . . . We are then incapable of knowing of either what He is or if He is. . . .
It is not possible to have reasonable grounds for not believing in miracles.
Imagination cannot make fools wise, but it makes them happy, as against reason, which only makes its friends wretched: one covers them with glory, the other with shame.
How hollow is the heart of man, and how full of excrement!
Equality of possessions is no doubt right, but, as men could not make might obey right, they have made right obey might.
Discourses on humility are a source of pride in the vain and of humility in the humble.
Curiosity is nothing more than vanity. More often than not we only seek knowledge to show it off.
Caesar was too old, it seems to me, to go off and amuse himself conquering the world. Such a pastime was all right for Augustus and Alexander; they were young men, not easily held in check, but Caesar ought to have been more mature.
Bless yourself with holy water, have Masses said, and so on; by a simple and natural process this will make you believe, and will dull you - will quiet your proudly critical intellect.
Anyone who found the secret of rejoicing when things go well without being annoyed when they go badly would have found the point.
An advocate who has been well paid in advance will find the cause he is pleading all the more just.
All our reasoning boils down to yielding to sentiment.
Man lives between the infinitely large and the infinitely small.