Pensées — Blaise Pascal

Pensées

Blaise Pascal · רישיון: Public domain · מקור

• _Authority._--So far from making it a rule to believe a thing because you have heard it, you ought to believe nothing without putting yourself into the position as if you had never heard it. SECTION IV · ¶765
• It is your own assent to yourself, and the constant voice of your own reason, and not of others, that should make you believe. SECTION IV · ¶766
• Belief is so important! A hundred contradictions might be true. If antiquity were the rule of belief, men of ancient time would then be without rule. If general consent, if men had perished? SECTION IV · ¶767
• Lift the curtain. You try in vain; if you must either believe, or deny, or doubt. Shall we then have no rule? We judge that animals do well what they do. Is there no rule whereby to judge men? SECTION IV · ¶769
• To deny, to believe, and to doubt well, are to a man what the race is to a horse. SECTION IV · ¶770
• Punishment of those who sin, error. SECTION IV · ¶771
• Those who do not love the truth take as a pretext that it is disputed, and that a multitude deny it. And so their error arises only from this, that they do not love either truth or charity. Thus they are without excuse. SECTION IV · ¶773
• We do not weary of eating and sleeping every day, for hunger and sleepiness recur. Without that we should weary of them. So, without the hunger for spiritual things, we weary of them. Hunger after righteousness, the eighth beatitude.[102] SECTION IV · ¶779
• Faith indeed tells what the senses do not tell, but not the contrary of what they see. It is above them and not contrary to them. SECTION IV · ¶781
• The last proceeding of reason is to recognise that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it. It is but feeble if it does not see so far as to know this. But if natural things are beyond it, what will be said of supernatural? SECTION IV · ¶785
• Submission is the use of reason in which consists true Christianity. SECTION IV · ¶789
• _St. Augustine._[104]--Reason would never submit, if it did not judge that there are some occasions on which it ought to submit. It is then right for it to submit, when it judges that it ought to submit. SECTION IV · ¶791
• Wisdom sends us to childhood. _Nisi efficiamini sicut parvuli._[105] SECTION IV · ¶793
• There is nothing so conformable to reason as this disavowal of reason. SECTION IV · ¶795
• If we submit everything to reason, our religion will have no mysterious and supernatural element. If we offend the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous. SECTION IV · ¶797
• All our reasoning reduces itself to yielding to feeling. SECTION IV · ¶799
• But fancy is like, though contrary to feeling, so that we cannot distinguish between these contraries. One person says that my feeling is fancy, another that his fancy is feeling. We should have a rule. Reason offers itself; but it is pliable in every sense; and thus there is no rule. SECTION IV · ¶800
• Men often take their imagination for their heart; and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted. SECTION IV · ¶802
• It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason. This, then, is faith: God felt by the heart, not by the reason. SECTION IV · ¶808
• Faith is a gift of God; do not believe that we said it was a gift of reasoning. Other religions do not say this of their faith. They only gave reasoning in order to arrive at it, and yet it does not bring them to it. SECTION IV · ¶810
• The knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him. SECTION IV · ¶812
• Therefore, those to whom God has imparted religion by intuition are very fortunate, and justly convinced. But to those who do not have it, we can give it only by reasoning, waiting for God to give them spiritual insight, without which faith is only human, and useless for salvation. SECTION IV · ¶818
• _Order.--Against the objection that Scripture has no order._ SECTION IV · ¶820
• The heart has its own order; the intellect has its own, which is by principle and demonstration. The heart has another. We do not prove that we ought to be loved by enumerating in order the causes of love; that would be ridiculous. SECTION IV · ¶821
• Jesus Christ and Saint Paul employ the rule of love, not of intellect; for they would warm, not instruct. It is the same with Saint Augustine. This order consists chiefly in digressions on each point to indicate the end, and keep it always in sight. SECTION IV · ¶822
• I confess indeed that one of those Christians who believe without proofs will not perhaps be capable of convincing an infidel who will say the same of himself. But those who know the proofs of religion will prove without difficulty that such a believer is truly inspired by God, though he cannot prove it himself. SECTION IV · ¶831
• For God having said in His prophecies (which are undoubtedly prophecies), that in the reign of Jesus Christ He would spread His spirit abroad among nations, and that the youths and maidens and children of the Church would prophesy;[108] it is certain that the Spirit of God is in these, and not in the others. SECTION IV · ¶832
• Instead of complaining that God had hidden Himself, you will give Him thanks for having revealed so much of Himself; and you will also give Him thanks for not having revealed Himself to haughty sages, unworthy to know so holy a God. SECTION IV · ¶834
• Two kinds of persons know Him: those who have a humble heart, and who love lowliness, whatever kind of intellect they may have, high or low; and those who have sufficient understanding to see the truth, whatever opposition they may have to it. SECTION IV · ¶835
• Surely, after considering what is life and what is religion, we should not refuse to obey the inclination to follow it, if it comes into our heart; and it is certain that there is no ground for laughing at those who follow it. SECTION IV · ¶838
• _Proofs of religion._--Morality, Doctrine, Miracles, Prophecies, Types. SECTION IV · ¶840
• In the letter _On Injustice_ can come the ridiculousness of the law that the elder gets all. "My friend, you were born on this side of the mountain, it is therefore just that your elder brother gets everything." SECTION V · ¶843
• He lives on the other side of the water. SECTION V · ¶846
• "Why do you kill me? What! do you not live on the other side of the water? If you lived on this side, my friend, I should be an assassin, and it would be unjust to slay you in this manner. But since you live on the other side, I am a hero, and it is just." SECTION V · ¶848
• On what shall man found the order of the world which he would govern?[109] Shall it be on the caprice of each individual? What confusion! Shall it be on justice? Man is ignorant of it. SECTION V · ¶850
• Theft, incest, infanticide, parricide, have all had a place among virtuous actions. Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him? SECTION V · ¶853
• Doubtless there are natural laws; but good reason once corrupted has corrupted all. _Nihil amplius nostrum est;[110] quod nostrum dicimus, artis est. Ex senatus--consultis et plebiscitis crimina exercentur.[111] Ut olim vitiis, sic nunc legibus laboramus._[112] SECTION V · ¶854
• _Mine, thine._--"This dog is mine," said those poor children; "that is my place in the sun." Here is the beginning and the image of the usurpation of all the earth. SECTION V · ¶857
• When the question for consideration is whether we ought to make war, and kill so many men--condemn so many Spaniards to death--only one man is judge, and he is an interested party. There should be a third, who is disinterested. SECTION V · ¶859
• _Veri juris._[118]--We have it no more; if we had it, we should take conformity to the customs of a country as the rule of justice. It is here that, not finding justice, we have found force, etc. SECTION V · ¶861

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