86 Famous Quotes by Blaise Pascal
6/19/1623 - 8/19/1662
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About Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Christian philosopher. 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. Pascal also wrote in defense of the scientific method.
In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines. After three years of effort and fifty prototypes, he invented the mechanical calculator. He built 20 of these machines in the following ten years. Pascal was an important mathematician, helping create two major new areas of research: he wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of 16, and later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science. Following Galileo and Torricelli, in 1646 he refuted Aristotle's followers who insisted that nature abhors a vacuum. Pascal's results caused many disputes before being accepted.
It is in vain, 0 men, that you seek within yourselves the cure for your miseries. All your insight only leads you to the knowledge that it is not in yourselves that you will discover the true and the good. The philosophers promised them to you, and have not been able to keep their promises... Your principal maladies are pride, which cuts you off from God, and sensuality, which binds you to the earth; and they have done nothing but foster at least one of these maladies. If they have given you God for your object, it has only been to pander to your pride; they have made you think that you were like Him and resembled Him by your nature. And those who have grasped the vanity of such a pretension have cast you down into the other abyss by making you believe that your nature was like that of the beasts of the field, and have led you to seek your good in lust, which is the lot of animals.
Christianity
Quotes, by Blaise Pascal
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Those who do not hate their own selfishness and regard themselves as more important than the rest of the world are blind because the truth lies elsewhere
Selfishness
Quotes, by Blaise Pascal
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The stream is always purer at its source.
[Fr., Les choses valent toujours mieux dans leur source.]
Purity
Quotes, by Blaise Pascal , Source: Lettres Provinciales (IV)
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Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.
Justice
Quotes, by Blaise Pascal
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Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.
Power
Quotes, by Blaise Pascal
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The vanity of the sciences. Physical science will not console me for the ignorance of morality in the time of affliction. But the science of ethics will always console me for the ignorance of the physical sciences.
Physics
Quotes, by Blaise Pascal
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The present is never our goal: the past and present are our means: the future alone is our goal. Thus, we never live but we hope to live; and always hoping to be happy, it is inevitable that we will never be so.
The present
Quotes, by Blaise Pascal
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The power of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special efforts, but by his ordinary doing
Virtue
Quotes, by Blaise Pascal
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If the nose of Cleopatra had been shorter, the whole face of the
earth would have been changed.
Influence
Quotes, by Blaise Pascal , Source: Thoughts (ch. VIII, 29)
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Opinion is the queen of the world.
[Lat., Della opinione regina del mondo.]
Opinion
Quotes, by Blaise Pascal , Source: quoted as the title of an Italian work
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He adopts the opinion of others like a monk in the Sorbonne.
[Fr., Il opine du bonnet comme un moine en Sorbonne.]
Opinion
Quotes, by Blaise Pascal , Source: Lettres Provinciales (II)
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Force and not opinion is the queen of the world; but it is
opinion that uses the force.
[Fr., La force est la reine du monde, et non pas l'opinion; mais
l'opinion est celle qui use de la force.]
Opinion
Quotes, by Blaise Pascal , Source: Pensees (art XXIV, 92)
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A jester, a bad character.
[Fr., Diseur de bon mots, mauvais caractere.]
Jesting
Quotes, by Blaise Pascal , Source: Pensees (art VI, 22)
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He who does not know his way to the sea should take a river for
his guide.
[Fr., Les rivieres sont des chemins qui marchant et qui portent
ou l'on veut aller.]
Rivers
Quotes, by Blaise Pascal , Source: Pensees (VII, 38)
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Rivers are roads that move and carry us whither we wish to go.
[Fr., Les rivieres sont des chemins qui marchant et qui portent
ou l'on veut aller.]
Rivers
Quotes, by Blaise Pascal , Source: Pensees (VII, 38)
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