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
Not the zeal alone of those who seek Him proves God, but the blindness of those who seek Him not.
Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without passion, without business, without entertainment, without care. It is then that he recognizes that he is empty, insufficient, dependent, ineffectual. From the depths of his soul now comes at once boredom, gloom, sorrow, chagrin, resentment and despair.
Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism.
You're basically killing each other to see who's got the better imaginary friend.
How can anyone lose who chooses to become a Christian? If, when he dies, there turns out to be no God and his faith was in vain, he has lost nothing...If, however, there is a God and a heaven and a hell. then he has gained heaven and his skeptical friends have lost everything...
The man who knows God but does not know his own misery, becomes proud. The man who knows his own misery but does not know God, ends in despair...the knowledge of Jesus Christ constitutes the middle course because in him we find both God and our own misery. Jesus Christ is therefore a God whom we approach without pride, and before whom we humble ourselves without despair.
To understand is to forgive.
The law required what it could not give. Grace gives that which it requires.
He who cannot believe is cursed, for he reveals by his unbelief that God has not chosen to give him grace.
To doubt is a misfortune, but to seek when in doubt is an indispensable duty. So he who doubts and seeks not is at once unfortunate and unfair.
Nature, which alone is good, is wholly familiar and common.
Imagination magnifies small objects with fantastic exaggeration until they fill our soul, and with bold insolence cuts down great things to its own size, as when speaking of God.
What a vast difference there is between knowing God and loving Him.
The mind has its arrangement; it proceeds from principles to demonstrations. The heart has a different mode of proceeding.