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
Rivers are roads which move, and which carry us whither we desire to go
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Water
It is impossible on reasonable grounds to disbelieve miracles.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Faith, Doubt, Belief
A truly worthy man should avoid naming himself; Christian piety annihilates the worldly me; worldly civility hides and suppresses it.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Egotism, Praise
Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without a passion, without business, without entertainment, without care.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Passion
It is superstitious to put one’s hopes in formalities, but arrogant to refuse to submit to them.
—Blaise Pascal
Let it not be imagined that the life of a good Christian must be a life of melancholy and gloominess; for he only resigns some pleasures to enjoy others infinitely better.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Christian
The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Reason
The immortality of the soul is a matter which is of so great consequence to us and which touches us so profoundly that we must have lost all feeling to be indifferent about it.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Feelings
He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God’s providence to lead him aright.
—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 have often said that all the misfortunes of men spring from their not knowing how to live quietly at home, in their own rooms.
—Blaise Pascal
The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. They throw earth over your head and it is finished forever.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Death
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
Voluptuousness, like justice, is blind; but that is the only resemblance between them.
—Blaise Pascal
If we let ourselves believe that man began with divine grace, that he forfeited this by sin, and that he can be redeemed only by divine grace through the crucified Christ, then we shall find peace of mind never granted to philosophers. He who cannot believe is cursed, for he reveals by his unbelief that God has not chosen to give him grace.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Belief
The mind of the greatest man on earth is not so independent of circumstances as not to feel inconvenienced by the merest buzzing noise about him; it does not need the report of a cannon to disturb his thoughts. The creaking of a vane or a pully is quite enough. Do not wonder that he reasons ill just now; a fly is buzzing by his ear; it is quite enough to unfit him for giving good counsel.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Trifles
Too much noise deafens us; too much light blinds us; too great a distance, or too much of promixity equally prevents us from being able to see; too long or too short a discourse obscures our knowledge of a subject; too much of truth stuns us.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Excess
Man is obviously made for thinking. Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Thought, Thinking, Thoughts
Two things control men’s nature: instinct and experience.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Experience
The war existing between the senses and reason.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Conflict
Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Change
Losses are comparative, imagination only makes them of any moment.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Failures, Mistakes
Beauty is a harmonious relation between something in our nature and the quality of the object which delights us.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Beauty, Virtues
Those we call the ancients were really new in everything.
—Blaise Pascal
All of our dignity consists in thought. Let us endeavor then to think well; this is the principle of morality.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Thought
Curiosity is only vanity. Most frequently we wish not to know, but to talk. We would not take a sea voyage for the sole pleasure of seeing without hope of ever telling.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Vanity, Curiosity
It is right that what is just should be obeyed. It is necessary that what is strongest should be obeyed.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Obedience
There is nothing so insupportable to man as to be in entire repose, without passion, occupation, amusement, or application. Then it is that he feels his own nothingness, isolation, insignificance, dependent nature, powerlessness, emptiness. Immediately there issue from his soul ennui, sadness, chagrin, vexation, despair.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Rest
The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Reading, Books
It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Freedom
We only consult the ear because the heart is wanting.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Listening
We never live, but we hope to live; and as we are always arranging to be happy, it must be that we never are so.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Life and Living
Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Enthusiasm
Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he feels his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Bores, Boredom
The property of power is to protect.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Power
Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Admiration
We are so presumptuous that we wish to be known to all the world, even to those who come after us; and we are so vain that the esteem of five or six persons immediately around us is enough to amuse and satisfy us.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Vanity
It is of dangerous consequence to represent to man how near he is to the level of beasts, without showing him at the same time his greatness. It is likewise dangerous to let him see his greatness without his meanness. It is more dangerous yet to leave him ignorant of either; but very beneficial that he should be made sensible of both.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Man
Let a man choose what condition he will, and let him accumulate around him all the goods and gratifications seemingly calculated to make him happy in it; if that man is left at any time without occupation or amusement, and reflects on what he is, the meagre, languid felicity of his present lot will not bear him up. He will turn necessarily to gloomy anticipations of the future; and unless his occupation calls him out of himself, he is inevitably wretched.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Happiness, Occupation
Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.
—Blaise Pascal
Topics: Truth, Rest, Leisure
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