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Blaise Pascal Quotes

Browse 6 quotes about Blaise Pascal.

Blaise Pascal Quotes

“What Pascal overlooked was the hair-raising possibility that God might out-Luther Luther. A special area in hell might be reserved for those who go to mass. Or God might punish those whose faith is prompted by prudence. Perhaps God prefers the abstinent to those who whore around with some denomination he despises. Perhaps he reserves special rewards for those who deny themselves the comfort of belief. Perhaps the intellectual ascetic will win all while those who compromised their intellectual integrity lose everything. There are many other possibilities. There might be many gods, including one who favors people like Pascal; but the other gods might overpower or outvote him, à la Homer. Nietzsche might well have applied to Pascal his cutting remark about Kant: when he wagered on God, the great mathematician 'became an idiot.”

PhilosophyMathematicianSpeculationNietzscheFriedrich NietzscheKantPascalHomerImmanuel KantBlaise PascalPascal S Wager
Book:Critique of Religion and Philosophy
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“There is a wide yawning black infinity. In every direction the extension is endless, the sensation of depth is overwhelming. And the darkness is immortal. Where light exists, it is pure, blazing, fierce; but light exists almost nowhere, and the blackness itself is also pure and blazing and fierce. But most of all, there is very nearly nothing in the dark; except for little bits here and there, often associated with the light, this infinite receptacle is empty. This picture is strangely frightening. It should be familiar. It is our universe. Even these stars, which seem so numerous, are, as sand, as dust, or less than dust, in the enormity of the space in which there is nothing. Nothing! We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal’s Pensées and read, 'I am the great silent spaces between worlds.' [From an undated, handwritten piece of text from the early 1950s which Sagan wrote when he was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago]”

LightScienceUniverseStarsSpaceSilentDepthTerrorAstronomyEndlessGreatImmortalInfinityFrighteningNothingBlacknessPascalEnormityBlaise Pascal
Author:Carl Sagan
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“We say 'everyone is entitled to his beliefs', recognising the nastiness of a world which will not tolerate alternative beliefs, but over-looking the fact that some beliefs are nonsense and deserve to be called prejudice, bigotry or superstition rather than merely belief. But as Pascal knew, our prejudices do not respond to reason alone. It is as though all the proofs and evidence of philosophy had mistaken their rationality for how people actually think.”

ReasonPhilosophyBeliefsBlaise Pascal
Book:Roads That Move: A Journey through Eastern Europe
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