I’ve been reading Blaise Pascal’s Pensees. Wow. Pascal was brilliant scientist and a fiery Christian thinker. The Pensees are a collection of thoughts about faith and the human condition that Pascal wrote but never published during his lifetime. Here are some of my favorite aphorisms from the Pensees so far (numbers in parens are to the numbering system in my Penguin Classics edition):
- Thinking too little about things or thinking too much both make us obstinate and fanatical. (21).
- Man’s condition. Inconstancy, boredom, anxiety. (24)
- Extremes in the law are extremes of injustice. Majority opinion is the best way because it can be seen and is strong enough to command obedience, but it is the opinion of those who are least clever. (85)
- Cause and effect. One must have deeper motives and judge everything accordingly, but go on talking like an ordinary person. (91)
2 replies on “Pascal's Wisdom”
David – I read Pascal about a year ago and also really enjoyed him. I listed some of my favorites here (http://philthreeten.blogspot.com/2005/08/additional-quotes-from-pascal.html) and here (http://philthreeten.blogspot.com/2005/08/quotes-from-pascal.html).
My all-time favorite is this: When all is equally agitated, nothing appears to be agitated, as in a ship. When all tend to debauchery, none appears to do so. He who stops draws attention to the excess of others, like a fixed point.
I want to be that fixed point!
There was a time when all I read was the Bible and the Pensees. I seem to remember this, and use it often with Atheists and the like, though it may not be quoted accurately:
“There is nothing more reasonable that to admit there is a point where reason must submit.”
Yours in Christ, Nick