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
Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.
The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.
Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.
We conceal it from ourselves in vain - we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.
To go beyond the bounds of moderation is to outrage humanity.
There are two kinds of people one can call reasonable: those who serve God with all their heart because they know him, and those who seek him with all their heart because they do not know him.
Unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just.
Silence. All human unhappiness comes from not knowing how to stay quietly in a room.
Do little things as if they were great, because of the majesty of the Lord Jesus Christ who dwells in thee.
The sensitivity of men to small matters, and their indifference to great ones, indicates a strange inversion.
Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.
It is certain that those who have the living faith in their hearts see at once that all existence is none other than the work of the God whom they adore. But for those in whom this light is extinguished, [if we were to show them our proofs of the existence of God] nothing is more calculated to arouse their contempt. . . .
In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't.
Few friendships would survive if each one knew what his friend says of him behind his back.