Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, religious thinker, and prose writer. His major works include Pensees, Provincial Letters, Treatise on the Arithmetical Triangle, and scientific writings on probability, pressure, and the vacuum. Pascal matters because he joined mathematical brilliance with a profound account of human restlessness, pride, misery, and longing for God. As a young man he contributed to projective geometry and later helped lay foundations for probability theory. His religious writings, shaped by Jansenist Christianity, examine reason and faith with extraordinary psychological force. The unfinished Pensees remains one of the most searching works of spiritual and philosophical reflection in European literature. Pascal's quotes endure because they are concise, unsettling, and alert to contradiction: humanity as both greatness and wretchedness, reason as powerful yet insufficient. His work still speaks to readers who feel both reason and longing at once.

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