Inspirational Quotes by Blaise Pascal
“[123] Contradictions. Contempt for our existence, dying for nothing, hatred of our existence.”
“One must know oneself. Even if that does not help in finding truth, at least it helps in running one's life, and nothing is more proper.”
“[98]. How is it that a lame man does not annoy us while a lame mind does? Because a lame man recognizes that we are walking straight, while a lame mind says that it is we who are limping. But for that we should feel sorry rather than angry. Epictetus goes much further when he asks: Why do we not lose our temper if someone tells us that we have a headache, while we do lose it if someone says there is anything wrong with our arguments or our choice?”
“ Dependence, desire for independence, needs.”
“For I should like to know by what right this animal, which recognizes his own weakness, measures God’s mercy and keeps it within limits suggested by his own fancies.”
“Man is so made that if he is told often enough that he is a fool he believes it. By telling himself so often enough he convinces himself, because when he is alone he carries on an inner dialogue with himself which it is important to keep under proper control. Evil communications corrupt good manners.1 We must keep silence as far as we can and only talk to ourselves about God, whom we know to be true, and thus convince ourselves that he is.”
“يود الإنسان أن يكون عظيما و يري أنه صغير, و يود أن يكون سعيدا و يري أنه شقي, و يود أن يكون موضع الحب و التقدير من الناس,و يري أن أخطاءه لا تجلب سوي كراهيتهم و احتقارهم. إن الحرج الذي يقع فيه نتيجة هذا التناقض يولد لديه أسوأ النزعات الإجرامية التي يمكن تخيلها, ذلك أنه يبدأ في كره الحقيقة التي تدينه و تريه عيبه ”
“Knowledge has two extremes which meet; one is the pure natural ignorance of every man at birth, the other is the extreme reached by great minds who run through the whole range of human knowledge, only to find that they know nothing and come back to the same ignorance from which they set out, but it is a wise ignorance which knows itself. Those who stand half-way have put their natural ignorance behind them without yet attaining the other; they have some smattering of adequate knowledge and pretend to understand everything. They upset the world and get everything wrong.”
“[108] What part of us feels pleasure? Is it our hand, our arm, our flesh, or our blood? It must obviously be something immaterial.”
“That is why those to whom God has given religious faith by moving their hearts are very fortunate, and feel quite legitimately convinced, but to those who do not have it we can only give such faith through reasoning, until God gives it by moving their heart, without which faith is only human and useless for salvation.”
“What kind of man had the Messiah to be, since through him the sceptre was to remain for ever in Judah, but at his coming the sceptre was to be removed from Judah? To ensure that seeing they should not see and hearing they should not hear,”
“This is how the whole of our life slips by. We seek repose by battling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome we find rest is unbearable because of the boredom it generates. ... We can't imaging a condition that is pleasant without fun and noise.”
topics: obstacles
“is in vain, O men, that you seek within yourselves the remedy for your ills. All your light can only reach the knowledge that not in yourselves will you find truth or good.”
“What is wonderful, incomparable and wholly divine is that this religion which has always survived has always been under attack.”
“[133] Diversion. Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things.”
“Gustavo Solivellas dice: "El corazón tiene razones que la razón ignora" (Blaise Pascal)”
“For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed. Porque, finalmente, ¿qué es el hombre en la naturaleza? Una nada frente al infinito, un todo frente a la nada, un medio entre nada y todo. Infinitamente alejado de comprender los extremos, el fin de las cosas y su principio le están invenciblemente ocultos en un secreto impenetrable, igualmente incapaz de ver la nada de donde ha sido sacado y el infinito en que se halla sumido.”
“All human unhappiness comes from not knowing how to stay quietly in a room.”
topics: unhapiness
“all humanity’s problems stem from an inability to sit in a quiet room alone.” Johnson, Fenton. At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life (p. 229). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.”
“Christianity is strange: it requires human beings to recognize that they are vile and even abominable.”
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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.