Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal was a French inventor, mathematician, writer and philosopher.  As a teenager, he pioneered work in calculating machines making him one of the first two inventors of the mechanical calculator. Unfortunately, he had poor health and died at age 39. Wonder how much more great things he could have done had he lived longer.

Like many writers, Pascal was a philosopher. Or is it like many philosophers Pascal was a writer. He has his brainy quotes which should be shared:

"Noble deeds that are concealed are most esteemed."

"Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary."

 "Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists."

"Kind words do not cost much yet they accomplish much."

"Man's greatness lies in his power of thought."

"There are only two kinds of men - the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous."

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."

"Do you wish people to speak well of you? Don't speak well of yourself."

"Time heals griefs and quarrels. For we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves."

"Truth is so obscure in these times and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it."

"Faith is different from proof, the latter is human, the former a gift from God."

"All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone."

"Can anything be stupider than that a man has a 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?"

"Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice and happiness, which are everything in this world."

"Since we cannot know all that is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about anything."

"Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just."

"The strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special exertions but by his habitual acts."

"Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical."

"Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.''

"You always admire what you don't really understand."

''We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves.''

''All our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.''

''I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.''

''Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.''

''Few friendships would survive if each knew what his friends say of him behind his back.''

''It is the heart that perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is; God perceived by the heart not by the reason.''

''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 recognise them, since that is to add the further fault of a voluntary illusion.''

''Vanity is but the surface.''

''The greater intellect one has the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.''

''It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.''

''Evil is easy and have infinite forms.''

"One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serve as a rule of life and there is nothing better.''

''People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered themselves than by those found by others.''

''As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.''