Inspirational Quotes by Blaise Pascal
“If a soldier or labourer complains of the hardship of his lot, set him to do nothing.”
topics: Contentment
“Men often take their imagination for their heart; and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.”
“Cold words freeze people, and hot words scorch them, and bitter words make them bitter, and wrathful words make them wrathful.”
topics: Criticism
“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?”
“Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.”
“Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.”
“Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them.”
topics: Faith
“Faith embraces many truths which seem to contradict each other.”
“Faith is different from proof; the latter is human, the former is a Gift from God.”
topics: Faith
“In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't.”
“It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.”
“Few friendships would survive if each one knew what his friend says of him behind his back.”
“I maintain that, if everyone knew what others said about him, there would not be four friends in the world.”
“Instead of complaining that God had hidden himself, you will give Him thanks for having revealed so much of Himself.”
“It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist.”
“That we must love one God only is a thing so evident that it does not require miracles to prove it.”
topics: God
“There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.”
“It is the heart which experiences God, not the reason.”
“All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room.”
topics: Good and Evil
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Among the contemporaries of Descartes none displayed greater natural genius than Pascal, but his mathematical reputation rests more on what he might have done than on what he actually effected, as during a considerable part of his life he deemed it his duty to devote his whole time to religious exercises.
At 16, Pascal began designing a calculating machine, which he finally perfected when he was thirty, the pascaline, a beautiful handcrafted box about fourteen by five by three inches. The first accurate mechanical calculator was born.
Pascal was dismayed and disgusted by society's reactions to his machine and completely renounced his interest in science an mathematics, devoting the rest of his life to God. He is best known for his collection of spiritual essays, Les Pensees.
Ironically, Pascal, who was a genius by any measure, with one of the finest brains of all time, died of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 39.
Among the contemporaries of Descartes none displayed greater natural genius than Pascal, but his mathematical reputation rests more on what he might have done than on what he actually effected, as during a considerable part of his life he deemed it his duty to devote his whole time to religious exercises.
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 generalizing the work of Evangelista Torricelli.
In 1646, he and his sister Jacqueline identified with the religious movement within Catholicism known by its detractors as Jansenism. Following a mystical experience in late 1654, he had his "second conversion", abandoned his scientific work, and devoted himself to philosophy and theology. His two most famous works date from this period: the Lettres provinciales and the Pensees.
In honor of his scientific contributions, the name Pascal has been given to the SI unit of pressure, to a programming language, and Pascal's law (an important principle of hydrostatics), and as mentioned above, Pascal's triangle and Pascal's wager still bear his name.