Inspirational Quotes by Blaise Pascal
“Kind words produce their own image in men's souls; and a beautiful image it is. They soothe and quiet and comfort the hearer. They shame him out of his sour, morose, unkind feelings. We have not yet begun to use kind words in such abundance as they ought to be used.”
topics: Kindness
“All the troubles of life come upon us because we refuse to sit quietly for a while each day in our rooms.”
“Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.”
topics: Life
“Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?”
topics: Life
“Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.”
“Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness... and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him.”
topics: Life
“We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.”
topics: Life
“The past and present are only our means; the future is always our end. Thus we never really live, but only hope to live.”
“We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves; we desire to live an imaginary life in the minds of others, and for this purpose we endeavor to shine.”
topics: Life
“Human beings must be known to be loved; but Divine beings must be loved to be known.”
topics: Love
“The knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him.”
“We conceal it from ourselves in vain - we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.”
topics: Love
“When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before.”
topics: Love
“Human things must be known to be loved; but Divine things must be loved to be known.”
topics: Love
“Lust and force are the source of all our actions; lust causes voluntary actions, force involuntary ones.”
topics: Lust
“The greatest single distinguishing feature of the omnipotence of God is that our imagination gets lost thinking about it.”
topics: Meditation
“It is impossible on reasonable grounds to disbelieve miracles.”
topics: Miracles
“Concupiscence and force are the source of all our actions; concupiscence causes voluntary actions, force involuntary ones.”
topics: Morality
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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.