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Pascal Quotes

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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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“Without knowing why, she brought her hair up to Pascal again. She knew he wouldn't be hurt. The little lizard was intrigued by whatever was going on; he nosed into her locks like a curious kitten. Immediately the sparkles that pulsed through her hair danced around him, falling and flickering. Soon they completely covered the little lizard like snow. Rapunzel watched, enchanted. Then he sneezed. Embers of magic flicked and faded as they fell to the earth. Rapunzel gasped. Pascal was perfectly fine. He just wasn't-- Pascal. He was an entirely different lizard. A lizard Rapunzel had never seen before, in books or anywhere. His eyes were now two balls that perched on the sides of his head and looked around independently of each other. His back was a graceful arch. His feet had two pairs of strange toes that opened up in the middle like claws. And his tail! It curled around and around and clasped onto her arm- prehensile and grasping, not a limp thing that just hung there to help with balance (and to occasionally break off and confuse a predator). And he was looking at himself! Holding his feet out one at a time and admiring them, thwacking the tip of his tail and snapping his mouth in satisfaction. Like a... person. He thoughtfully gazed back at his body, considering it. His skin suddenly started to change color: a wave of brown, and then red, pulsed through him from nose to tail. "Pascal!" Rapunzel cried. "You're a dragon!" She only wished he had turned into a slightly larger dragon so she could ride and/or hug him.”

TransformationCompanionDragonChameleonRapunzelPascalSilver Hair
Book:What Once Was Mine
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“She knew it was a lizard from pictures in the fairy-tale book, long and lithe and dry and scaly but with legs, unlike a snake (lizards were turned into handsome footmen in "Cinderella"). Probably a skink of some kind. The reptile bore her touch with the vacuous patience of a cold-blooded creature that liked to be warm and didn't smell anything dangerous like a fox or a hawk. Its experience with humans was minimal to none. Rapunzel, of course, assumed this not-running-away meant it was a potential Wilderness Friend. "I'm not going to kill you," she promised the little lizard and herself. "You adorable soft-skinned thing! You're perfect!" She would tell her mother what she had done and then show her mother the lizard... and then it was only a matter of convincing her to take her to the floating lights. She wasn't a danger. "Isn't that right... Pascal? I'm going to call you Pascal!" And with that she plucked the lizard deftly up and put him on her shoulder.”

PetCompanionChameleonRapunzelPascal
Book:What Once Was Mine
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“When I look back on my life nowadays, which I sometimes do, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed at the time most significant and seductive, seems now most futile and absurd. For instance, success in all of its various guises; being known and being praised; ostensible pleasures, like acquiring money or seducing women, or traveling, going to and fro in the world and up and down in it like Satan, exploring and experiencing whatever Vanity Fair has to offer. In retrospect all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called “licking the earth.”

WorldLooksSelfSometimesSeemsEarthPleasureKnownFantasyExerciseOffersPureFairsVariousStrikesSignificantAbsurdInstanceVanitySatanExploringUp And DownGratificationSeductiveSeducingRetrospectGuiseLickingPascalVanity FairSelf Gratification
Author:Malcolm Muggeridge
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“Pascal makes no attempt in this most famous argument to show that his Roman Catholicism is true or probably true. The reasons which he suggests for making the recommended bet on his particular faith are reasons in the sense of motives rather than reasons in the sense of grounds. Conceding, if only for the sake of the present argument, that we can have no knowledge here, Pascal tries to justify as prudent a policy of systematic self-persuasion, rather than to provide grounds for thinking that the beliefs recommended are actually true.”

IfsThinkingTryingSelfReasonShowsBeliefAtheismPolicyParticularArgumentSakePositive AtheismMotiveJustifyCatholicismPersuasionFlewSystematicPrudentRoman CatholicPascal
Author:Antony Flew
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“After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that what we are thinking of, the book we are reading, scarcely matters any more. We have put something of ourselves everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and we can make discoveries no less precious than in Pascal's Pensées in an advertisement for soap.”

ThinkingBookMatterAgeCertainReadingMemoriesDangerousDiscoveryPensSoapOur MemoriesFertileAdvertisementsIntertwinedPascal
Book:The captive, The fugitive
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“When all moves equally (says Pascal), nothing seems to move as in a vessel under sail; and when all run by common consent into vice, none appear to do so. He that stops first, views as from a fixed point the horrible extravagance that transports the rest.”

FirstsSeemsRunningMovingViewsCommonVicesHorribleFixedSailConsentVesselTransportExtravagancePascal
Book:Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words Addressed to Those who Think
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“I blame the newspapers because every day they call our attention to insignificant things, while three or four times in our lives,we read books that contain essential things. Once we feverishly tear the band of paper enclosing our newspapers, things should change and we should find--I do not know--the Pensées by Pascal!”

KnowsShouldBookThreeAttentionKnowledgeFourOur LivesTearsBandEssentialsPaperNewsBlameNewspapersPensInsignificantPascalInsignificant Things
Author:Marcel Proust
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“If Montaigne is a man in the prime of life sitting in his study on a warm morning and putting down the sum of his experience in his rich, sinewy prose, then Pascal is that same man lying awake in the small hours of the night when death seems very close and every thought is heightened by the apprehension that it may be his last.”

IfsMenMaySeemsLastsLyingNightHoursMorningStudyRichSittingWarmAwakeProsePrimeApprehensionPascalPrime Of Life
Book:The Condemned Playground
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“You can purchase the mind of Pascal for a crown. Pleasures even cheaper are sold to those who give themselves up to them. It is only luxuries and objects of caprice that are rare and difficult to obtain; unfortunately they are the only things that touch the curiosity and taste of ordinary men.”

MenGivingMindDifficultPleasureObjectsTasteOrdinaryCuriosityLuxuryCrownsCheaperOrdinary ManCapricePascal
Book:La Bruyère and Vauvenargues: Selections from the Characters, Reflexions and Maxims
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“I do not like the late resurrection of the Jesuits. . . . If ever any congregation of men could merit eternal perdition on earth, and in hell, according to these historians, though, like Pascal, true Catholics, it is this company of Loyolas.”

IfsMenEarthCompanyHellEternalLateEternityCatholicMeritHistorianResurrectionCongregationPascalJesuitPerdition
Book:The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: With a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations
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“It is reported of that prodigy of parts, Monsieur Pascal, that till the decay of his health had impaired his memory, he forgot nothing of what he had done, read, or thought, in any part of his rational age. This is a privilege so little known to most men, that it seems almost incredible to those who, after the ordinary way, measure all others by themselves; but yet, when considered, may help us to enlarge our thoughts towards greater perfections of it, in superior ranks of spirits.”

MenWayMayLittlesDoneHelpingSeemsAgeSpiritMemoriesKnownGreaterOrdinaryPerfectionIncrediblesPrivilegeSuperiorsRationalDecayOur ThoughtsProdigiesPascal
Book:The Philosophical Works of John Locke
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“I suppose that every age has its own particular fantasy: ours is science. A seventeenth-century man like Blaise Pascal, who thought himself a mathematician and scientist of genius, found it quite ridiculous that anyone should suppose that rational processes could lead to any ultimate conclusions about life, but easily accepted the authority of the Scriptures. With us, it is the other way `round”

MenWayShouldAgeFoundProcessFantasyCenturyParticularGeniusAuthorityUltimateScientistRoundsAcceptedRidiculousScriptureRationalConclusionMathematicianPascal
Author:Malcolm Muggeridge
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“Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.... storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape. Life, Pascal said, is like living in a prison from which every day fellow prisoners are taken away to be executed. We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentence of death, and we all think of our lives as narratives, with beginnings, middles and ends.”

ThinkingHumansSaidEndsTakenOur LivesBloodHuman NatureBreathsFellowsPrisonSentencesStorytellingNarrativePrisonerCirculationNarrationPascal
Author:A. S. Byatt
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“Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.”

WorldHumansGovernmentChurchWhiteRaceParticularCivilizationRacismCancerAlsGenocideJudaismHuman HistoryNewtonEmancipationAlgebraParliamentaryBaroquePascalWhite RaceWhite GenocideParliamentary Government
Author:Susan Sontag
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“You don't become an 'artist' unless you've got something missing somewhere. Blaise Pascal called it a God-shaped hole. Everyone's got one but some are blacker and wider than others. It's a feeling of being abandoned,cut adrift in space and time-sometimes following the loss of a loved one. You can never completely fill that hole-you can try with songs,family,faith and by living a full life...but when things are silent, you can still hear the hissing of what's missing.”

TryingStillsSometimesFeelingsArtistSongLossSpaceCuttingMissingSilentFollowingHolesAbandonedLoved OnesTime And SpaceFull LifeLoss Of A Loved OneAdriftPascalHissing
Author:Bono
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“So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?”

MindFirstsMaySaidSeemsScienceFatherAtheismPositionProveEvidenceGardenWeakSightBottomAtheistTeethFairyCopAgnosticOpen MindSecond ThoughtsKeep An Open MindPascalGod DelusionTooth FairyWagersFather Christmas
Author:Richard Dawkins
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“People think of faith as being something that you don't really believe, a device in helping you believe simply it. Of course that is quite wrong. As Pascal says, faith is a gift of God. It is different from the proof of it. It is the kind of faith God himself places in the heart, of which the proof is often the instrument... He says of it, too, that it is the heart which is aware of God, and not reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not be reason.”

PeopleThinkingBelieveHeartKindDifferentReasonHelpingCoursesInstrumentsProofDevicesGift From GodPascal
Author:Malcolm Muggeridge
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“[Pascal] was the first and perhaps is still the most effective voice to be raised in warning of the consequences of the enthronement of the human ego in contradistinction to the cross, symbolizing the ego's immolation. How beautiful it all seemed at the time of the Enlightenment, that man triumphant would bring to pass that earthly paradise whose groves of academe would ensure the realization forever of peace, plenty, and beatitude in practice. But what a nightmare of wars, famines, and folly was to result therefrom.”

MenFirstsHumansStillsWarBeautifulVoiceResultsPracticeForeverEgoEnlightenmentConsequenceCrossesRaisedRealizationPlentyParadiseFollyNightmareWarningFamineTriumphantGrovePascal
Author:Malcolm Muggeridge
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