Quotes About Pascal

Algorithmic thought arose before the invention of geometry in Greece, and reemerged in Europe with Pascal and Leibniz, who invented two calculating machines and, like Thumbelina, used pseudonyms.

Vanity is illustrated in the cause and effect of love, as in the case of Cleopatra.

heart had reasons of which reason knew nothing, the only quote of Pascal's

I've always believed in the Nero Wolfe theory of knowledge. You can just sit quietly in your room - according to Pascal, the activity that if practiced more assiduously would free humanity from most of its troubles, but that was before e-mail - and through sheer mental effort force the tiniest snippets of information to yield the entire story of which they are a fragment, because the whole truth is contained in every particle of it, the way every human cell contains our DNA.

After a time, Fogelin shifted into writing and editing manuals. Often lampooned, these texts, if studied with a fanaticism ordinarily reserved for the Bible, revealed a multitude of secrets.

If this were so; if the desert were 'home'; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert - then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal's imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison.

One constant is that, to achieve all the purposes of reading, the desideratum must be the ability to read different things at different—appropriate—speeds, not everything at the greatest possible speed. As Pascal observed three hundred years ago, "When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing." Since

I don't do rewrites. I put all the pages in a pile next to the typewriter.

How many of the great mathematicians have been perverts?" None, was his answer. "Some lived celibate lives, usually on account of economic disabilities, but the majority were happily married. . . . The only mathematician discussed here whose life might offer something of interest to a Freudian is Pascal

The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.

The Christian religion teaches me two points-that there is a God whom men can know, and that their nature is so corrupt that they are unworthy of Him.

Pascal's Wager?" asked Dr. Trinh. "Pascal once said that you should believe in God because, if you turned out to be wrong, you weren't losing anything, and if you turned out to be right, the reward was infinite," Corvallis said.

Pascal once said that you should believe in God because, if you turned out to be wrong, you weren't losing anything, and if you turned out to be right, the reward was infinite

Pascal, if I remember rightly, would not suffer his mother to kiss him as he feared the contact of her sex.

Pascal told only half the story. He said man was a thinking reed. What man is, is a thinking reed and a walking genital.

As we look at the major acquisitions that others made during 1982, our reaction is not envy, but relief that we were non-participants. For in many of these acquisitions, managerial intellect wilted in competition with managerial adrenaline. The thrill of the chase blinded the pursuers to the consequences of the catch. Pascal's observation seems apt: "It has struck me that all men's

There is a remarkable sentence of Pascal according to which we know too little to be dogmatists and too much to be skeptics, which expresses beautifully what Plato conveys through his dialogues.

If Cleopatra's nose, said Pascal, had been an inch longer or shorter, all history would have been changed.

Buechner is a worthy member of the great prose stylists: Pascal, Newman, and Merton, who have harnessed their art to a passionate religious faith.

but to pun on no less a maven than Blaise Pascal, "The art has its reasons, which reason knows nothing of.

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.

The world thinks men are good and saints are better. Pascal knows men are sinners and saints are miracles.

Pascal said, All history is one immortal man who continually learns.

You are mistaken there, my dear child," said Madame de Godollo. "Pascal, who was himself a great example of the falseness of your point of view, says, if I am not mistaken, that a little science draws us from religion, but a great deal draws us back to it.