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Blaise Pascal
80 quotes
“Rules necessary for definitions. Not to leave any terms at all obscure or ambiguous without definition; Not to employ in definitions any but terms perfectly known or already explained.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Rules necessary for axioms. Not to demand in axioms any but things perfectly evident.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Rules necessary for demonstrations. To prove all propositions, and to employ nothing for their proof but axioms fully evident of themselves, or propositions already demonstrated or admitted; Never to take advantage of the ambiguity of terms by failing mentally to substitute definitions that restrict or explain them.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These five rules [above] form all that is necessary to render proofs convincing, immutable, and to say all, geometrical; and the eight rules together render them even more perfect.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is necessary to show that there is nothing so little known [as the above rules], nothing more difficult to practice, or nothing more useful and universal.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As to the objection that these rules are common in the world, that it is necessary to define every thing and to prove every thing, and that logicians themselves have placed them among their art, I would that the thing were true and that it were so well known... But so little is this the case, that, geometricians alone excepted, who are so few in number that they are a single in a whole nation and long periods of time, we see no others that know it.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If they have entered into the spirit if these rules, and if the rules have made sufficient impression on them to become rooted and established in their minds, they will feel how much difference there is between what is said here and what a few logicians may perhaps have written by chance approximating to it in a few passages of their works.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All who say the same things do not possess them in the same manner; and hence the incomparable author of the Art of Conversation pauses with so much care to make it understood that we must not judge of the capacity of a man by the excellence of a happy remark that we heard him make. ...let us penetrate, says he, the mind from which it proceeds... it will oftenest be seen that he will be made to disavow it on the spot, and will be drawn very far from this better thought in which he does not believe, to plunge himself into another, quite base and ridiculous.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One man will say a thing of himself without comprehending its excellence, in which another will discern a marvelous series of conclusions, which makes us affirm that it is no longer the same expression, and that he is no more indebted for it to the one from whom he has learned it, than a beautiful tree belongs to the one who cast the seed, without thinking of it, or knowing it, into the fruitful soil which caused its growth by its own fertility.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Logic has borrowed, perhaps, the rules of geometry, without comprehending their force... it does not thence follow that they have entered into the spirit of geometry, and I should be greatly averse... to placing them on a level with that science that teaches the true method of directing reason.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The method of not erring is sought by all the world. The logicians profess to guide it, the geometricians alone attain it, and apart from science, and the imitations of it, there are no true demonstrations.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing is more common than good things: the point in question is only to discriminate them; and it is certain that they are all natural and within our reach and even known to all mankind.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not among extraordinary and fantastic things that excellence is to be found, of whatever kind it may be. We rise to attain it and become removed from it: it is oftenest necessary to stoop for it.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The best books are those, which those who read them believe they themselves could have written.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nature, which alone is good, is wholly familiar and common.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I make no doubt... that these rules are simple, artless, and natural.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The mind must not be forced; artificial and constrained manners fill it with foolish presumption, through unnatural elevation and vain and ridiculous inflation, instead of solid and vigorous nutriment.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the principal reasons that diverts those who are entering upon this knowledge so much from the true path which they should follow, is the fancy that they take at the outset that good things are inaccessible, giving them the name great, lofty, elevated, sublime. This destroys everything. I would call them low, common, familiar: these names suit it better; I hate such inflated expressions.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the small space which I fill, or even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified, and wonder that I am here rather than there, for there is no reason why here rather than there, or now rather than then. Who has set me here? By whose order and design have this place and time been destined for me?—Memoria hospitis unius diei prætereuntis. It is not well to be too much at liberty. It is not well to have all we want. How many kingdoms know nothing of us! The eternal silence of these infinite spaces alarms me.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Misery of Man Without God": "Man's Disproportion," The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal translated from the Text of M. Auguste Molinier Tr. C. Kegan Paul (1885)
“One, knowing the duties of man and being ignorant of his impotence, is lost in presumption, and that the other, knowing the impotence and being ignorant of the duty, falls into laxity; whence it seems that since the one leads to truth, the other to error, there would be formed from their alliance a perfect system of morals. But instead of this peace, nothing but war and a general ruin would result from their union; for the one establishing certainty, the other doubt, the one the greatness of man, the other his weakness, they would destroy the truths as well as the falsehoods of each other. So that they cannot subsist alone because of their defects, nor unite because of their opposition, and thus they break and destroy each other to give place to the truth of the Gospel. This it is that harmonizes the contrarieties by a wholly divine act, and uniting all that is true and expelling all that is false, thus makes of them a truly celestial wisdom in which those opposites accord that were incompatible in human doctrines.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I would inquire of reasonable persons whether this principle: Matter is naturally wholly incapable of thought, and this other: I think, therefore I am, are in fact the same in the mind of Descartes, and in that of St. Augustine, who said the same thing twelve hundred years before. ...I am far from affirming that Descartes is not the real author of it, even if he may have learned it only in reading this distinguished saint; for I know how much difference there is between writing a word by chance without making a longer and more extended reflection on it, and perceiving in this word an admirable series of conclusions, which prove the distinction between material and spiritual natures, and making of it a firm and sustained principle of a complete metaphysical system, as Descartes has pretended to do. ...it is on this supposition that I say that this expression is as different in his writings from the saying in others who have said it by chance, as in a man full of life and strength, from a corpse.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest bartlett, Public domain source
“It is not permitted to the most equitable of men to be a judge in his own cause.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest bartlett, Public domain source
“Montaigne is wrong in declaring that custom ought to be followed simply because it is custom, and not because it is reasonable or just.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest bartlett, Public domain source
“Thus we never live, but we hope to live; and always disposing ourselves to be happy, it is inevitable that we never become so.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest bartlett, Public domain source
“If the nose of Cleopatra had been shorter, the whole face of the earth would have been changed.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest bartlett, Public domain source
“The last thing that we find in making a book is to know what we must put first.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest bartlett, Public domain source
“Rivers are highways that move on, and bear us whither we wish to go.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest bartlett, Public domain source
“What a chimera, then, is man! what a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! A judge of all things, feeble worm of the earth, depositary of the truth, cloaca of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe!”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest bartlett, Public domain source
“We know the truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said by 1662 at the latest bartlett, Public domain source