Quotes About Pascal

Pascal said that "the doubt of God implies belief in God.

you might as well wager on God because that way, even if He doesn't exist, you've nothing to lose. Whereas if you wager against God and He does exist . . .

There is in Shaw, as in Gurdjieff and Nietzsche, a recognition of the immense effort of Will that is necessary to express even a little freedom, that places them beside Pascal and St. Augustine as religious thinkers. Their view is saved from pessimism only by its mystical recognition of the possibilities of pure Will, freed from the entanglements of automatism

And what if Pascal had not been saved and if those narrow hands in which we laid a cross are just he, entire, like a lifeless swallow in the dust, under the buzz of the poisonous-blue flies? And if they all, kneeling with poised palms, millions, billions of them, ended together with their illusion? I shall never agree. I will give them the crown. The human mind is splendid; lips powerful, and the summons so great it must open Paradise.

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.

In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth.

Modern as the style of Pascal's writing is, his thought is deeply impregnated with the spirit of the Middle Ages. He belonged, almost equally, to the future and to the past.

Don't you feel terror in the presence of the infinite spaces that Pascal speaks of?" She replied: "Why should I feel afraid? Isn't this world the house of God? Instead of frightening me, they move me to take flight into my soul with the confidence of a creature of God.

Pascal and his brilliant exposition in Pensées. "I have often said," Pascal wrote, "that the sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his own room."46

As Pascal wrote long ago, "Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.

As Pascal observed, when God addresses our human hearts, there is always enough light for those who desire to see, yet enough obscurity for those who do not wish to see. What makes the difference is the heart.

Das Unglück des Menschen rührt daher, daß er nicht still in seinem Zimmer bleiben will, dort, wo er hingehört. Sagt Pascal. Aber Pascal

Seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote: "The eternal silence of the infinite spaces terrifies me.

With all due respect to Israel's primo king, David and I are not on the same page here. I'm more with the seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal, who lived when modern science was coming into its own, and who had public nervous breakdowns in his Pensées such as: "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.