Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662) was an illustrious French thinker and writer, born at Clermont, in Auvergne. He was distinguished at once as a mathematician, a physicist, and a philosopher. At the age of 16, he wrote a treatise on conic sections, which astonished Descartes. At 18 invented a calculating machine, and afterwards he made experiments in pneumatics and hydrostatics, by which his name became associated with those of Torricelli and Boyle.An accident which befell him turned his thoughts to religious subjects, and in 1654 he retired to the convent of Port Royal, where he spent as an ascetic the rest of his days, and wrote his celebrated "Provincial Letters" in defence of the Jansenists against the Jesuits, and his no less famous "Pensées," which were published after his death. "His great weapon in polemics," says Prof. Saintsbury, "is polite irony, which he first brought to perfection, and in the use of which he has hardly been equalled, and has certainly not been surpassed since".
Wisdom & Quotes
- Things are always at their best in their beginning.
- I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short.
From Pensees
- If the nose of Cleopatra had been a little shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed.
- All human evil comes from this: a man's being unable to sit still in a room.
- Be comforted. You would not be seeking Me if you had not found Me.
- La Coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point.
- Justice without force is impotent; force without justice is tyranny.
- Our nature lies in movement; complete rest is death.
- Nature is an infinite sphere of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.
- When the passions become masters, they are vices.
- Men despise religion; they hate it, and they fear it is true.
- Religion is so great a thing that it is right that those who will not take the trouble to seek it if it be obscure, should be deprived of it.
- Do you wish people to believe good of you? Don't speak.
- The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.
- We arrive at truth, not by reason only, but also by the heart.
- There may be guilt when there is too much virtue.
- Wisdom sends us back to our childhood.
Mme de Sevigne