Thoughts from the Mind and Heart of French Thinker Blaise Pascal

Creative commons, France.

He had a sharp mind and an influential pen. Blaise Pascal's primary fields were mathematics, logic, physics and theology. And like many others who achieve significance, the secular thinkers of his day wished he'd left his theological aspirations off to one side. Similar complaints were made about Sir Isaac Newton. "Think about all he could have accomplished had he left all that religious stuff in the closet," they'd say, not realize that his religious beliefs gave him confidence in an orderly universe and a foundation for his secular explorations. Pascal was cut from the same cloth.

For some today, "Pascal" is simply a computer programming language developed around 1970. I remember reading about it even if I never used it. The name was assigned to this early programming language because of Blaise Pascal's early success in creating a machine that could do calculations. In 1642, at age twenty, he invented the calculating machine pictured at the top of this page.

In the broader public, I think he is more famous for what has come to be known as Pascal's Wager, a philosophical argument that attempts to use logic to answer questions about God's existence and our purpose in this incomprehensible mystery called life. Here is a pithy distillation of the idea: "If God does not exist, one will lose nothing by believing in him, while if he does exist, one will lose everything by not believing."

You can find a more elaborate explanation here.

What follows are some insightful statements by Blaise Pascal from his letters and books.

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"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."
(How many of  you thought Hemingway said this?)

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"It is not well to be too much at liberty. It is not well to have all we want."

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"All the excesses, all the violence, and all the vanity of great men, come from the fact that they know not what they are."
(EdNote: Am reading about General Douglas MacArthur in David Halverstram's The Fifties. It's stunning the degree to which big egos can lose all touch with reality.)

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"It is a natural illness of man to think that he possesses the truth directly…"
--On the Spirit of Geometry

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"The art of persuasion consists as much in that of pleasing as in that of convincing, so much more are men governed by caprice than by reason!"

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"People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others."

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"Those honor nature well, who teach that she can speak on everything, even on theology."

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"Few friendships would remain, if each knew what his friend said of him when he wasn't there."

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"Make religion attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is. Worthy of reverence because it really understands human nature. Attractive because it promises true good."

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"All good maxims are in the world. We only need apply them."

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If you wish for more, here is a link to Pascal on Wikiquotes.