Author

Blaise Pascal

Posthumous or imagined likeness of Blaise Pascal.
Posthumous or imagined likeness of Blaise Pascal. Source · Public domain

Frequently Cited

“I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber”
Pensees, Fragment 139, Section II · Reader
“The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know”
Pensees, Fragment 277, Section IV · Reader
“Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed”
Pensees, Fragment 347, Section VI · Reader
Pensees

Blaise Pascal

1670 · Renaissance Early Modern · Philosophy

The Pensées ('Thoughts') are the fragments of an unfinished apology for the Christian religion, found after Pascal's death in 1662 as nearly a thousand notes, many on slips of paper threaded together in bundles. Pascal had planned a work that would first unsettle the complacent unbeliever (the honnête homme of polite society) by showing the misery and contradiction of the human condition, then show that Christianity alone explains that condition and offers its remedy.

high medical relevanceFaith / ReligionDoubt MeaningDeath / Mortality