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
Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason.
Nothing is as approved as mediocrity, the majority has established it and it fixes it fangs on whatever gets beyond it either way.
Man's sensitivity to the little things and insensitivity to the greatest are the signs of a strange disorder.
Man's grandeur is that he knows himself to be miserable.
Justice is what is established; and thus all our established laws will necessarily be regarded as just without examination, since they are established.
A jester, a bad character.
Atheism shows strength of mind, but only to a certain degree.
There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.
Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.
Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.
The last proceeding of reason is to recognize that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it. There is nothing so conformable to reason as this disavowal of reason.
We have an idea of truth, invincible to all scepticism.
There would be too great darkness, if truth had not visible signs.
All mankind's unhappiness derives from one thing: his inability to know how to remain in repose in one room.