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Quote by Blaise Pascal

Work

Pensées

Pensées is a collection of Pascal's thoughts and reflections on various philosophical, religious, and scientific topics. more

Author

Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, philosopher, and theologian. He was born on June 19, 1623, and died on August 19, 1662. Pascal's contributions to mathematics were particularly significant, with groundbreaking work in probability theory, analytical geometry, and early calculus. more

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“Mâini bătătorite de sapă, de munci grele, mâini care luaseră pe încetul înfățișarea și culoarea pământului uscat și crăpat. Acum, reci, se odihnesc: nu se vor mai clinti niciodată... Acolo, în țărână, peste ani de zile, când vor rămâne numai un schelet deșirat, oasele mâinilor au să se mai odihnească încă, pe gratiile coastelor, împreunate, neclintite, așa cum niciodată nu s-au odihnit.”

“She saw the birth unfolding, saw the small creature with those strangely wise eyes that seemed to belong to every newborn. And then the years rushing on, the child growing, faces taking the shape they would carry into old age. But not all. As mother after mother stepped through her, futures flashed bright, and some died quickly indeed. Fraught, flickering sparks, ebbing, winking out, darkness rushing in. And at these she cried out, filled with anguish even as she understood that souls travelled countless journeys, of which only one could be known by a mortal, so many, in countless perturbations, and that the loss belonged only to others, never to the child itself, for in its inarticulate, ineffable wisdom, understanding was absolute; the passage of life that seemed tragically short could well be the perfect duration, the experience complete. Others, however, died in violence, and this was a crime, an outrage against life itself. Here, among these souls, there was fury, shock, denial. There was railing, struggling, bitter defiance.”

“Our contemporary Western celebrations forget the dead altogether, or at least remove them from any association with grief and loss. They offer no comfort to those who mourn. We are, after all, a society that has done all it can to erase death, to pursue youth to the bitter end, and to sideline the elderly and infirm. For most of us, the old tradition of laying out our own dead is long forgotten, and the idea that we might be intimate with death is now some kind of a gothic joke. Today's Halloween simply reflects what we secretly think—that death is a surrender to decay that makes us monsters.”