Quotes About Pascal

#1. Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

Susan Sontag

#2. I have long since learned, as a measure of elementary hygiene, to be on guard when anyone quotes Pascal.

Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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

James Joyce

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

Billy Graham

#5. Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.1 Pascal

David Eagleman

#6. What Pascal said of an effective religion is true of any effective doctrine: it must be contrary to nature, to common sense and to pleasure.

Eric Hoffer

#7. Pascal and C are special-purpose languages for manipulating the registers and memory of a von Neumann-style computer.

Peter Norvig

#8. Foolish. Stupid. I knew it. I knew my reaction was unreasonable, bu the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. Blaise Pascal said that, and I've always found it to be true.

Megan Hart

#9. The heart," Blaise Pascal said, "has its reasons which reason knows not of.

John Eldredge

#10. I'm most impressed by the Russian writers, so I love reading the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Another author who has informed the way I think is the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal.

Andrea Bocelli

#11. Go is most fun I've had with a compiled PL since I've discovered Turbo Pascal as a kid.

Bojan Markovic

#12. When all moves equally (says Pascal), nothing seems to move as in a vessel under sail; and when all run by common consent into vice, none appear to do so. He that stops first, views as from a fixed point the horrible extravagance that transports the rest.

Charles Caleb Colton

#13. If you want a language that tries to lock up all the sharp objects and fire-making implements, use Pascal or Ada: the Nerf languages, harmless fun for children of all ages, and they won't mar the furniture.

Scott Fahlman

#14. A programming language that is sort of like Pascal except more like assembly except that it isn't very much like either one, or anything else. It is either the best language available to the art today, or it isn't.

Raymond Simard

#15. Pascal and Voltaire both probably had IQs in the neighborhood of 200.

Paul Popenoe

#16. I've always been very keen on Pascal, and what I'm most keen on in Pascal is his emphasis upon human wretchedness. He has a phrase which goes something like 'Anxiety, boredom and inconstancy, that is the human condition' and I've always been very partial to that.

Simon Critchley

#17. As Blaise Pascal put it in his famous wager: "You have to wager. It is not up to you, you are already committed."7 You can't not bet your life on something. You can't not be headed somewhere. We live leaning forward, bent on arriving at the place we long for.

James K.A. Smith

#18. Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point. French. Pascal. The heart has its reasons, whereof reason knows nothing.

Madeleine L'Engle

#19. Maybe it is like Pascal's Wager, but I want to believe in the immortality of the soul because consciousness is such a fantastic gift that is feels cruel and unfair to end it so quickly.

Thomm Quackenbush

#20. Male conspiracy cannot explain all female failures. I am convinced that, even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal, Milton, or Kant. Genius is not checked by social obstacles: it will overcome.

Camille Paglia

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

Walker Percy

#22. You know what they say the modern version of Pascal's Wager is? Sucking up to as many Transhumanists as possible, just in case one of them turns into God.

Greg Egan

#23. Science can tell us what exists; but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart.

William James

#24. suppose the god who confronts you when you die turns out to be Baal, and suppose Baal is just as jealous as his old rival Yahweh was said to be. Mightn't Pascal have been better off wagering on no god at all rather than on the wrong god?

Richard Dawkins

#25. 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.

Bruce Chatwin

#26. TeX has found at least one bug in every Pascal compiler it's been run on, I think, and at least two in every C compiler

Donald Knuth

#27. I have always considered "Pascal's Wager" a questionable bet to place, since any God worth believing in would prefer an honest agnostic to a calculating hypocrite.

Alan M. Dershowitz

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

Louis Auchincloss

#29. Heart had reasons of which reason knew nothing, the only quote of Pascal's

Karen Marie Moning

#30. Pascal meditated upon outer space, but we need only turn our thoughts inward to feel his dread. Inside every one of our skulls lies an organ so vast in its complexity that it might as well be infinite.

Sebastian Seung

#31. Anthropologically informed works, from Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough to Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained or Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust, fascinatingly document the bizarre phenomenology of superstition and ritual. Read such books and marvel at the richness of human gullibility. But that is not

Richard Dawkins

#32. Newton, Pascal, Bossuet, Racine, F?nelon
that is to say, some of the most enlightened men on earth, in the most philosophical of all ages
have been believers in Jesus Christ; and the great Cond?, when dying, repeated these noble words, "Yes, I shall see God as He is, face to face!".

Luc De Clapiers

#33. I have to create a circle of reading for myself: Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Pascal, The New Testament. This is also necessary for all people.

Leo Tolstoy

#34. You can purchase the mind of Pascal for a crown. Pleasures even cheaper are sold to those who give themselves up to them. It is only luxuries and objects of caprice that are rare and difficult to obtain; unfortunately they are the only things that touch the curiosity and taste of ordinary men.

Luc De Clapiers

#35. Pascal Lee is a true pioneer of Mars exploration.

Buzz Aldrin

#36. I do not like the late resurrection of the Jesuits ... If ever any congregation of men could merit eternal perdition on earth, and in hell, according to these historians, though, like Pascal, true Catholics, it is this company of Loyolas.

John Adams

#37. 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.

Lytton Strachey

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

Malcolm Muggeridge

#39. 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.

Christopher Hitchens

#40. Let Pascal say that man is a thinking reed. He is wrong; man is a thinking erratum. Each period in life is a new edition that corrects the preceding one and that in turn will be corrected by the next, until publication of the definitive edition, which the publisher donates to the worms.

Machado De Assis

#41. Printings, he told Pascal Covici, his editor at The Viking Press, that he was immensely pleased

John Steinbeck

#42. I am a Christian which means that I believe in the deity of Christ, like Tycho de Brahe, Copernicus, Descartes, Newton, Leibnitz, Pascal ... like all great astronomers mathematicians of the past.

Augustin-Louis Cauchy

#43. I suspect you're thinking of Pascal,' Finkler said, finally.'Only he said the opposite. He said 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 ... '
'You're in the shit.

Howard Jacobson

#44. 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?

Richard Dawkins

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

Aldous Huxley

#46. Man is neither angel nor beast, and the misfortune is that he who wishes to be an angel becomes a beast' (Blaise Pascal).

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#47. 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.

Lytton Strachey

#48. 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.

Emile Zola

#49. All our reasoning boils down to yielding to sentiment.

Blaise Pascal

#50. We implore the mercy of God, not that He may leave us at peace in our vices, but that He may deliver us from them.

Blaise Pascal

#51. For in fact what is man in nature? A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything.

Blaise Pascal

#52. Meanings receive their dignity from words instead of giving it to them.

Blaise Pascal

#53. We must know where to doubt, where to feel certain, where to submit. He who does not do so, understands not the force of reason.

Blaise Pascal

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

Francine Pascal

#55. That something so obvious as the vanity of the world should be so little recognized that people find it odd and surprising to be told that it is foolish to seek greatness; that is most remarkable.

Blaise Pascal

#56. Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

Blaise Pascal

#57. Civil wars are the greatest of evils. They are inevitable, if we wish to reward merit, for all will say that they are meritorious.

Blaise Pascal

#58. Anyone who found the secret of rejoicing when things go well without being annoyed when they go badly would have found the point.

Blaise Pascal

#59. Lord, help me to do great things as though they were little, since I do them with your power; And little things as though they were great, since I do them in your name!

Blaise Pascal

#60. The mind has its arrangement; it proceeds from principles to demonstrations. The heart has a different mode of proceeding.

Blaise Pascal

#61. Man's grandeur is that he knows himself to be miserable.

Blaise Pascal

#62. The art of subversion, of revolution, is to dislodge established customs by probing down to their origins in order to show how they lack authority and justice.

Blaise Pascal

#63. The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play

Blaise Pascal

#64. A feeling is no longer the same when it comes the second time. It dies through the awareness of its return. We become tired and weary of our feelings when they come too often and last too long.

Pascal Mercier

#65. Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it.

Blaise Pascal

#66. You corrupt religion either in favour of your friends, or against your enemies.

Blaise Pascal

#67. In difficult times carry something beautiful in your heart.

Blaise Pascal

#68. This is how the whole of our life slips by. We seek repose by battling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome we find rest is unbearable because of the boredom it generates ... We can't imaging a condition that is pleasant without fun and noise.

Blaise Pascal

#69. I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

Blaise Pascal

#70. 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.

Blaise Pascal

#71. Knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride.
Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair.
Knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance because he shows us both God and our own wretchedness.

Blaise Pascal

#72. We seek rest in a struggle against some obstacles. And when we have overcome these, rest proves unbearable because of the boredom it produces ...

Blaise Pascal

#73. The secrets of nature are concealed; her agency is perpetual, but we do not always discover its effects; time reveals them from age to age; and although she is always the same in herself, she is not always equally well known.

Blaise Pascal

#74. For the chief malady of man is restless curiosity about things which he cannot understand; and it is not so bad for him to be in error as to be curious to no purpose.

Blaise Pascal

#75. Man is nothing but insincerity, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in regard to himself and in regard to others. He does not wish that he should be told the truth, he shuns saying it to others; and all these moods, so inconsistent with justice and reason, have their roots in his heart.

Blaise Pascal

#76. Amusement allures and deceives us and leads us down imperceptibly in thoughtlessness to the grave

Blaise Pascal

#77. The heart has reasons of which the mind knows nothing.

Blaise Pascal

#78. We must learn our limits. We are all something, but none of us are everything.

Blaise Pascal

#79. I can approve of those only who seek in tears for happiness.

Blaise Pascal

#80. We should seek the truth without hesitation; and, if we refuse it, we show that we value the esteem of men more than the search for truth.

Blaise Pascal

#81. Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?

Blaise Pascal

#82. May God never abandon me.

Blaise Pascal

#83. Little things comfort us because little things distress us.

Blaise Pascal

#84. Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature! Learn that man infinitely transcends man, hear from your master your true condition, which is unknown to you.

Blaise Pascal

#85. Then there was a silence he had never before experienced: in it, you could hear the years.

Pascal Mercier

#86. [T]he sovereignty of reason and justice is no more tyrannical than that of desire. They are principles natural to man.

Blaise Pascal

#87. Remorse is extremely useful for a generation which has in fact dirtied its hands but for the next generation you cannot ask, for instance, young Germans today to feel guilty about Hitlerism.

Pascal Bruckner

#88. I just went to your typical public schools, and my dad would take us to the movies every week, or he'd buy scalped tickets to San Antonio Spurs games. I remember I was four or five years old and my parents, who were very young, took us to see The Police in Austin, and Iggy Pop opened.

Pedro Pascal

#89. There is nothing that we can see on earth which does not either show the wretchedness of man or the mercy of God. One either sees the powerlessness of man without God, or the strength of man with God.

Blaise Pascal

#90. We are not going to confine women to the home, cover their heads, lengthen their skirts, or beat up gay people, prohibit alcohol, censure film, theater, and literature, and codify tolerance in order to respect the overly sensitive whims of a few sanctimonious persons.

Pascal Bruckner

#91. The last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it.

Blaise Pascal

#92. Fashion is a tyrant from which nothing frees us. We must suit ourselves to its fantastic tastes. But being compelled to live under its foolish laws, the wise man is never the first to follow, nor the last to keep it.

Blaise Pascal

#93. Elizabeth scowled, feeling like a nobody, a nothing. She felt like her entire self had been made worthless. She could change her interests, but she couldn't change her looks. She'd never be six feet tall. She'd never look like a supermodel.

Francine Pascal

#94. How vain painting is, exciting admiration by its resemblance to things of which we do not admire the originals.

Blaise Pascal

#95. The weakness of human reason appears more evidently in those who know it not than in those who know it.

Blaise Pascal

#96. Nature compensates for its mistakes.

Francine Pascal

#97. No one is ignorant that there are two avenues by which opinions are received into the soul, which are its two principal powers: the understanding and the will.

Blaise Pascal

#98. Man's greatness comes from knowing he is wretched.

Blaise Pascal

#99. Our senses will not admit anything extreme. Too much noise confuses us, too much light dazzles us, too great distance or nearness prevents vision, too great prolixity or brevity weakens an argument, too much pleasure gives pain, too much accordance annoys.

Blaise Pascal

#100. There are plenty of maxims in the world; all that remains is to apply them.

Blaise Pascal