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
The most powerful cause of error is the war existing between the senses and reason
All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.
Civil wars are the greatest of evils. They are inevitable, if we wish to reward merit, for all will say that they are meritorious.
The war existing between the senses and reason.
We must kill them in war, just because they live beyond the river. If they lived on this side, we would be called murderers.
On the occasions when I have pondered over men's various activities, the dangers and worries they are exposed to at court or at war, from which so many quarrels, passions, risky, often ill-conceived actions and so on are born, I have often said that man's unhappiness springs from one thing alone, his incapacity to stay quietly in one room. A man wealthy enough for life's needs would never leave home to go to sea or beseige some fortress if he knew how to stay at home and enjoy it...
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.