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
For as old age is that period of life most remote from infancy, who does not see that old age in this universal man ought not to be sought in the times nearest his birth, but in those most remote from it?
Love has no age as it is always renewing itself.
The secrets of nature are concealed; her agency is perpetual, but we do not always discover its effects; time reveals them from age to age; and although she is always the same in herself, she is not always equally well known.
We make an idol of truth itself, for truth apart from charity is not God, but his image and an idol that we must not love or worship.
The sensibility of man to trifles, and his insensibility to great things, indicates a strange inversion.
Sleep, you say, is the image of death; for my part I say that it is rather the image of life.
Two extremes: to exclude reason, to admit reason only.
What is man in nature? Nothing in relation to the infinite, all in relation to nothing, a mean between nothing and everything
And which of you with taking thought can add to his stature one cubit?
The most powerful cause of error is the war existing between the senses and reason
Nature diversifies and imitates; art imitates and diversifies.
Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature; but he is a thinking reed.
Man is but a reed, the most weak in nature, but he is a thinking reed
Mahomet established a religion by putting his enemies to death; Jesus Christ by commanding his followers to lay down their lives