The Center for Renaissance and Reformation: Articles on Pascal

Articles on Pascal 2

The following articles provide background information on the life and thought of Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) (author of the Pensees).

"Pascal: The First Modern Christian" by Edward T. Oakes (First Things, August/September 1999).

"Creation's Symmetries, God's Mystery: Blaise Pascal pioneered in math and physics but drew faith from revelation alone." by George Murphy (Christian History, "The Christian Face of the Scientific Revolution"
Issue 76 | 2002)

“A Mirror Darkly” by Anthony Sacramone (review of Arts of Darkness: American Noir and the Quest for Redemption by Thomas S. Hibbs) (First Things, April 2008).

Pascal quotes:

“I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.”

“Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.”

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.”

“People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered themselves than by those found by others.”

“Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.”

"What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself"

“One must know oneself, if this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.”

“The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.”

“We know truth, not only by reason, but also by the heart.”

“Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.”

“Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what it loves.”

“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.”

“If all men knew what each said of the other, there would not be four friends in the world.”

“Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being.”

“Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.”

“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.”

“By a peculiar prerogative, not only each individual is making daily advances in the sciences, and may makes advances in morality, but all mankind together are making a continual progress in proportion as the universe grows older; so that the whole human race, during the course of so many ages, may be considered as one man, who never ceases to live and learn.”

“We think very little of time present; we anticipate the future, as being too slow, and with a view to hasten it onward, we recall the past to stay it as too swiftly gone. We are so thoughtless, that we thus wander through the hours which are not here, regardless only of the moment that is actually our own.”