Blaise Pascal (1623–62) was a French mathematician, physicist, religious philosopher, and master of prose. Later a Jansenist scholar, he wrote two classics of French devotional thought, the Lettres Provinciales 1656–57,) directed against the casuistry of the Jesuits, and Pensées (1670,) a defense of Christianity.
Born in Clermont-Ferrand, France, Pascal was the son of a venerated mathematician and a local bureaucrat. Early in life, Pascal proved that he was a prodigy by discovering Euclid’s first 23 propositions for himself at the age of 11. Pascal’s work contains his famous theorem on a hexagram inscribed in a conic.
While only 17, Pascal published an essay on mathematics that René Descartes refused to recognize as being the work of a teen. Pascal produced (1642–44) a calculating device to aid his father in his local administration; Gottfried Leibniz later simplified it.
With Pierre de Fermat, Pascal laid the foundations of the mathematical system of probability. He also contributed to calculus and hydrodynamics, devising Pascal’s Law in 1647. He developed the hydraulic press, the barometer, and the syringe and published his work on vacuums in 1647. The SI unit of pressure is named after him.
In 1646, Pascal converted to Jansenism, and religion became progressively dominant in his life, culminating in him joining the Jansenist retreat at Port-royal Des Champs in 1655. There, Pascal disseminated a religious doctrine that clarified the experience of God through the heart instead of through reason. The establishment of his belief of intuitionism had a bearing on such later philosophers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Henri Bergson and on the Existentialists.
Pascal’s notes for a casebook of Christian truths were found after his death and published as the Pensées in 1669. They contain intense perceptions of religious truths coupled with a suspicion of rationalist thought and theology.
Notable biographies of Pascal include Jean Mesnard’s Pascal: His Life and Works (1951; trans. 1952) and Ernest Mortimer’s Blaise Pascal: The Life and Work of a Realist (1959.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Blaise Pascal
All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Feelings
It is impossible on reasonable grounds to disbelieve miracles.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Doubt, Belief, Faith
All men have happiness as their object: there are no exceptions. However different the means they employ, they aim at the same end.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Happiness, Being Ourselves
The heart has its reasons, which Reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things. It is the heart which feels God, and not Reason. This, then, is perfect faith: God felt in the heart.
—Blaise Pascal
It is much better to know something about everything than to know everything about one thing.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Knowledge, Education, Learning
I do not admire a virtue like valour when it is pushed to excess, if I do not see at the same time the excess of the opposite virtue, as one does in Epaminondas, who displayed extreme valour and extreme benevolence. For otherwise it is not an ascent, but a fall. We do not display our greatness by placing ourselves at one extremity, but rather by being at both at the same time, and filling up the whole of the space between them.
—Blaise Pascal
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.
—Blaise Pascal
I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Authors & Writing, Brevity
Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.
—Blaise Pascal
Faith embraces many truths which seem to contradict each other.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Faith
If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Thinking, Thoughts, Thought
If we subject everything to reason, our religion will have nothing mysterious or supernatural; if we violate the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Religion
The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.
—Blaise Pascal
I have concluded that the whole misfortune of men comes from a single thing, and that is their inability to remain at rest in a room.
—Blaise Pascal
I lay it down as a fact that if all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Friendship, Gossip
The world is satisfied with words, few care to dive beneath the surface.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Words, Perfection
On vanity: The nose of Cleopatra: if it had been shorter, the face of the earth would have changed.
—Blaise Pascal
Instinct teaches us to look for happiness outside ourselves.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Helpfulness, Kindness, Happiness, Goodwill
To deny, to believe, and to doubt absolutely—this is for man what running is for a horse.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Doubt
In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.
—Blaise Pascal
Faith is God felt by heart, not by reason.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Faith, Belief
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