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
Evil is easy, and has infinite forms.
All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room.
Civil wars are the greatest of evils. They are inevitable, if we wish to reward merit, for all will say that they are meritorious.
Most of the evils of life arise from man's being unable to sit still in a room.
We never do evil so effectually as when we are led to do it by a false principle of conscience.
All evil stems from this-that we do. Know how to handle your solitude.
Truly it is an evil to be full of faults; but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and to be unwilling to recognize them, since that is to add the further fault of a voluntary illusion.
If it is an extraordinary blindness to live without investigating what we are, it is a terrible one to live an evil life, while believing in God
We sometimes learn more from the sight of evil than from an example of good; and it is well to accustom ourselves to profit by the evil which is so common, while that which is good is so rare.
When we would think of God, how many things we find which turn us away from Him, and tempt us to think otherwise. All this is evil, yet it is innate.
The power of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special efforts, but by his ordinary doing
Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it
Reason commands us far more imperiously than a master. When we disobey the latter we are punished, when we disobey the former we are fools.
People act as though our mission were to secure the triumph of truth, whereas our sole mission is fight for it. The wish to be victorious is so natural that when it clothes itself in the desire for the triumph of truth, the two are often confused, an