Inspirational Quotes by Blaise Pascal
“Desire and force between them are responsible for all our actions; desire causes our voluntary acts, force our involuntary.”
topics: Good and Evil
“Man's true nature being lost, everything becomes his nature; as, his true good being lost, everything becomes his good.”
topics: Good and Evil
“St. Augustine teaches us that there is in each man a Serpent, an Eve, and an Adam. Our senses and natural propensities are the Serpent; the excitable desire is the Eve; and reason is the Adam. Our nature tempts us perpetually; criminal desire is often excited; but sin is not completed till reason consents.”
topics: Good and Evil
“Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.”
topics: Habits
“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.”
“Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.”
topics: Habits
“The strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts.”
topics: Habits
“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.”
topics: Habits
“Two things control men's nature, instinct and experience.”
“There once was in man a true happiness of which now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present. But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.”
“Happiness is neither without us nor within us. It is in God, both without us and within us.”
topics: Happiness
“If our condition were truly happy, we would not seek diversion from it in order to make ourselves happy.”
topics: Happiness
“It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.”
“All mankind's unhappiness derives from one thing: his inability to know how to remain in repose in one room.”
topics: Happiness
“Everyone, without exception, is searching for happiness.”
topics: Happiness
“All men have happiness as their object: there are no exceptions. However different the means they employ, they aim at the same end.”
“Instinct teaches us to look for happiness outside ourselves.”
topics: Happiness
“As we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.”
topics: Happiness
“If man is not made for God, why is he happy only in God?”
topics: Happiness
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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.