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
Reflect on death as in Jesus Christ, not as without Jesus Christ. Without Jesus Christ it is dreadful, it is alarming, it is the terror of nature. In Jesus Christ it is fair and lovely, it is good and holy, it is the joy of saints.
To find recreation in amusements is not happiness; for this joy springs from alien and extrinsic sources, and is therefore dependent upon and subject to interruption by a thousand accidents, which may minister inevitable affliction.
Pride counterbalances all our miseries, for it either hides them, or, if it discloses them, boasts of that disclosure. Pride has such a thorough possession of us, even in the midst of our miseries and faults, that we are prepared to sacrifice life with joy, if it may but be talked of.
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
Thus we never live, but we hope to live; and always disposing ourselves to be happy, it is inevitable that we never become so.
Thus our first interest and our first duty is to enlighten ourselves on this subject, whereon depends all our conduct. Therefore among those who do not believe, I make a vast difference between those who strive with all their power to inform themselv
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.
And which of you with taking thought can add to his stature one cubit?
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