Quotes About Pascal

Pascal's wager, to her mind: Although an atheist, Pascal said he would make a deathbed confession to God. If there was no God to hear it, what difference did it make? But if there was . . .

Although an atheist, Pascal said he would make a deathbed confession to God. If there was no God to hear it, what difference did it make? But if there was . . .

Suffering; impossibility of being comfortable anywhere; oppression, irritations and remorse one after the next, everything under the sign wretchedness of man, used by Pascal.

Nietzsche] refers to two great events which in modern times were made to prevent a radical deepening of human thought: Jesuitism in the 17th century and the democratic enlightenment in the 18th and 19th. But there are two men (in each case one man) who opposed these reactionary things. In the case of Jesuitism, it was Pascal; in the case of the democratic enlightenment, it is Nietzsche.

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

We make an idol of truth itself; for truth apart from charity is not God, but his image and idol, which we must neither love nor worship. Pascal

Guilt, as the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner has diagnosed it in his book La Tyrannie de la pénitence, has become a moral intoxicant in Western Europe.

Ed felt faint. Milk shake, as it turned out, was much less handy in your veins then, say, oxygen.

Don't make light of werewolves, Jessica,' Luke said in a quiet voice. 'They're very serious business.

Oooh. Barbie has a brain, huh? The smile was gone. His voice low, gravelly. Oooh. Ken has an attitude, she snapped back.

These three people, Pascal, Blake, and Dostoyevsky, illustrate perfectly what I have long believed to be the case, that history consists of parables whereby God communicates in terms that the imagination rather than the mind, faith rather than knowledge, can grasp.

Susan Sontag did in 1967, that "the truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, the emancipation of women … don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought on the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

WE ALMOST NEVER think of the present, and when we do, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future.1 These are Pascal's words, and it is easy to see how perceptive he was about the virtual nonexistence of the present, consumed as we are by using the past to plan what-comes-next, a moment away or in the distant future. That

Pascal was even convinced that he could use his theories to justify a belief in God. He stated that 'the excitement that a gambler feels when making a bet is equal to the amount he might win multiplied by the probability of winning it'.

Borges spune cu destul? dreptate c? Pascal se intereseaz? mai puÅ£in de Dumnezeu, cît de combaterea celor care-l t?g?duiesc. In fond, Pascal avea temperament de polemist. Toat? opera lui e un atac mai mult sau mai puÅ£in deghizat. (Este si motivul pentru care-mi place atît de mult.)

Pascal had formulated a famous wager in favor of the existence of God: If you bet there is no God and you are wrong, a wrathful deity is likely to condemn your eternal soul to hellfire; but if you gamble that there is a God and there is not, your consciousness will cease to exist upon your death and you will never know that you were wrong.

Two errors, wrote Pascal, a thinker Andrew once admired. One: to take everything literally. Two: to take everything spiritually.

Pascal: l'unica cosa che conta è l'inquietudine divina delle anime inappagate.

Heard the Bible read two hours—Pascal one hour and a quarter—meditation one hour and a quarter…. Pitt called and commended Butler's Analogy—resolved to write to him, and discover to him what I am occupied about: this will save me much embarrassment, and I hope give me more command both of my time and conduct.

We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal's 'Pensees' and read, 'I am the great silent spaces between worlds.'

The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of. PASCAL

Figure, movement. Everything happens, says Pascal, from figure and movement. To say in this case that everything happens from movement, for every figure is no more than the lingering trace of a movement that has already ceased. Thus the letters that I am forming now, for example, are only the pen's lingering trace of the movement of my hand.

In sheer genius Pascal ranks among the very greatest writers who have lived upon this earth. And his genius was not simply artistic; it displayed itself no less in his character and in the quality of his thought.

Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.