Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, and Catholic writer. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Wikipedia

• Born: June 19, 1623, Clermont-Ferrand, France

• Died: August 19, 1662, Paris, France

• Parents: Étienne Pascal, Antoinette Begon

Great Thoughts OF pascal

"Look for the truth, it wants to be found."

"There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator."

"Don't try to add more years to your life. Better add more life to your years."

"Happiness is neither within us, nor without us. It is in the union of ourselves with God."

"Man's sensitivity to the little things and insensitivity to the greatest are the signs of a strange disorder."

"The more I see of Mankind, the more I prefer my dog."

"It's not those who write the laws that have the greatest impact on society. It's those who write the songs."

"We must learn our limits. We are all something, but none of us are everything."

"Mankind suffers from two excesses: to exclude reason, and to live by nothing but reason."

"Wisdom leads us back to childhood."

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

"If we do not know ourselves to be full of pride, ambition, lust, weakness, misery, and injustice, we are indeed blind. And if, knowing this, we do not desire deliverance, what can we say of a man...?"

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

"What amazes me most is to see that everyone is not amazed at his own weakness"

"To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize."

"Parents fear the destruction of natural affection in their children. What is this natural principle so liable to decay? Habit is a second nature, which destroys the first. Why is not custom nature? I suspect that this nature itself is but a first custom, as custom is a second nature."

"I do not admire the excess of a virtue like courage unless I see at the same time an excess of the opposite virtue, as in Epaminondas, who possessed extreme courage and extreme kindness. Otherwise it is not rising to the heights but falling down. We show greatness, not by being at one extreme, but by touching both the extreme at same time and occupying all the space in between ."