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
Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?
Rivers are highways that move on and bear us whither we wish to go.
We must kill them in war, just because they live beyond the river. If they lived on this side, we would be called murderers.
He who does not know his way to the sea should take a river for his guide.
Rivers are roads that move and carry us whither we wish to go. [Fr., Les rivieres sont des chemins qui marchant et qui portent ou l'on veut aller.]
Rivers are roads which move, and which carry us whither we desire to go.
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.