Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.
Author
French · 1623-1662 · 10 quotes
French · 1623–1662
10 quotes in our collection
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.
Common Themes
Collected Quotes
Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.
Thought constitutes the greatness of man.
The present is never our end; the past and the present are our means; the future alone is our end.