A quick review of Blaise Pascal, his early life, his notable achievements, and his many famous quotes, you find early on why Pascal was such a memorable personality in his day.
Pascal was an intellectual, a prodigy. Quite encouraging to know that of all his accomplishments, he is remembered primarily for 'Pascal's Wager', an common sense evangelical question posed in his book 'Pensées' which put forth this thought -
"Even though the existence of God cannot be determined through reason, a person should wager as though God exists, because living life accordingly has everything to gain, and nothing to lose."
About Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal was a very influenchial French mathematician and philosopher who contributed to many areas of mathematics. He worked on conic sections and projective geometry and in correspondence with Fermat he laid the foundations for the theory of probability.
When Pascal died in 1662, he left behind an unfinished theological work (relating to religious faith and practices), the Pensées. This was an apology, or defense, for Christianity.
Earthly things must be known to be loved; divine things must be loved to be known.
If all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.
I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's inability to sit still in a room.
Kind words do not cost much. They never blister the tongue or lips. They make other people good-natured. They also produce their own image on men's souls, and a beautiful image it is.
Little things console us because little things afflict us.
Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.
Men never do evil so fully and so happily as when they do it for conscience's sake.
There are only three types of people; those who have found God and serve him; those who have not found God and seek him, and those who live not seeking, or finding him. The first are rational and happy; the second unhappy and rational, and the third foolish and unhappy.
If you would have people speak well of you, then do not speak well of yourself.
It is right that what is just should be obeyed. It is necessary that what is strongest should be obeyed.
The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.
Beauty is a harmonious relation between something in our nature and the quality of the object which delights us.
Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.
Evil is easy, and has infinite forms.
The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.
Happiness is neither without us nor within us. It is in God, both without us and within us.
Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.
The weather and my mood have little connection. I have my foggy and my fine days within me; my prosperity or misfortune has little to do with the matter.
Men blaspheme what they do not know.
Truly it is an evil to be full of faults; but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and to be unwilling to recognize them, since that is to add the further fault of a voluntary illusion.
n faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't.
The gospel to me is simply irresistible.
Jesus is the God whom we can approach without pride and before whom we can humble ourselves without despair.
Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.
Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.
Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.
If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then, without hesitation, that He exists.
Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.
The knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him.
When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before.
You always admire what you really don't understand.
There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.
He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God's providence to lead him aright.
It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist.
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