Quotes About Pascal

When Pascal wrote of the heart as having reasons that reason does not know, he was referring to a type of knowledge that is foreign to the academic disciplines and different from the type of knowledge we seek in daily life. He was referring to the knowledge of a transformation that could never be placed into words or experience and thus could never be objectified, dissected, and distanced from us.

I took Pascal, and I was terrible. And then, when I went to NYU, I minored in computer science. I just couldn't code. I just didn't have the patience for it.

It is a wager with an infinite upside and no downside. And, I might add, it is a wager every human being must make. It is not optional. Pascal's Wager—the logic is impeccable.

J.B. Bury once followed Pascal in suggesting that the cause of the foundation of the Roman Empire was the length of Cleopatra's nose: had her features not been perfectly proportioned, Mark Antony would not have been entranced; had he not been entranced he would not have allied himself with Egypt against Octavian; had he not made that alliance, the battle of Actium would not have been fought—and so on.

We are talking about a bet, remember, and Pascal wasn't claiming that his wager enjoyed anything but very long odds. Would you bet on God's valuing dishonestly faked belief (or even honest belief) over honest scepticism?

The sum of evil, Pascal remarked, would be much diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms.

No religion except ours has taught that man is born in sin; none of the philosophical sects has admitted it; none therefore has spoken the truth

We have so exalted a notion of the human soul that we cannot bear to be despised, or even not to be esteemed by it. Man, in fact, places all his happiness in this esteem.

To scorn philosophy is truly to philosophize.

I rather live as if God exists to find out that He doesn't than live as if he doesn't exist to find out He does.

If god does not exist, one loses nothing by believing in him anyway, while if he does exist, one stands to lose everything by not believing.

Il est non seulement impossible, mais inutile de conna|"tre Dieu sans Je sus-Christ. It is not only impossible, but also useless to recognize God without Jesus.

Down inside we have a longing for God-what Pascal called "the vacuum which God left behind.

Let us weigh the gain and the loss, in wagering that God is. Consider these alternatives: if you win, you win all, if you lose you lose nothing. Do not hesitate, then, to wager that he is.

Men are so inevitably mad that not to be mad would be to give a mad twist to madness.

I often think . . . that the bookstores that will save civilization are not online, nor on campuses, nor named Borders, Barnes & Noble, Dalton, or Crown. They are the used bookstores, in which, for a couple of hundred dollars, one can still find, with some diligence, the essential books of our culture, from the Bible and Shakespeare to Plato, Augustine, and Pascal.

I didn't much believe in god and the things people labeled as miracles did little to convince me otherwise, but it was at times like these that made me consider which was the more cruel: a cold and random universe or a god with a perverse sense of humor? With all due respect to Blaise Pascal, I chose to believe that no god was better than a cruel one.

It is the conduct of God, who disposes all things kindly, to put religion into the mind by reason, and into the heart by grace.

To be mistaken in believing that the Christian religion is true is no great loss to anyone; but how dreadful to be mistaken in believing it to be false!

I would have far more fear of being mistaken, and of finding that the Christian religion was true, than of not being mistaken in believing it true.

For a moment he [Doctor Pascal] thought he could see, in a flash, the future of the Rougon-Macquart family, a pack of wild, satiated appetites in the midst of a blaze of gold and blood.

Pascal was of the opinion that "one was well-minded to understand holy writ when one hated oneself."20 There is apparently some connection between dissatisfaction with oneself and a proneness to credulity

You know, sometimes I get moments of inspiration when I'm writing something and then the task seems so daunting that it just kind of scares me away.

There's been some research in cognitive science, I'm told, that discloses that there have always been perhaps 10 to 15 percent of people who are, as Pascal puts it, so made that they cannot believe. To us, when people talk about faith, it's white noise.