Pensées — Blaise Pascal

Pensées

Blaise Pascal · Άδεια: Public domain · Πηγή

• No one passes in the world as skilled in verse unless he has put up the sign of a poet, a mathematician, etc. But educated people do not want a sign, and draw little distinction between the trade of a poet and that of an embroiderer. SECTION I · ¶134
• It is therefore false praise to give a man when we say of him, on his entry, that he is a very clever poet; and it is a bad sign when a man is not asked to give his judgment on some verses. SECTION I · ¶136
• If lightning fell on low places, etc., poets, and those who can only reason about things of that kind, would lack proofs. SECTION I · ¶146
• If we wished to prove the examples which we take to prove other things, we should have to take those other things to be examples; for, as we always believe the difficulty is in what we wish to prove, we find the examples clearer and a help to demonstration. SECTION I · ¶148
• _Epigrams of Martial._--Man loves malice, but not against one-eyed men nor the unfortunate, but against the fortunate and proud. People are mistaken in thinking otherwise. SECTION I · ¶151
• To call a king "Prince" is pleasing, because it diminishes his rank. SECTION I · ¶154
• Do you wish people to believe good of you? Don't speak. SECTION I · ¶158
• Languages are ciphers, wherein letters are not changed into letters, but words into words, so that an unknown language is decipherable. SECTION I · ¶160
• A maker of witticisms, a bad character. SECTION I · ¶162
• There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth. SECTION I · ¶164
• To mask nature and disguise her. No more king, pope, bishop--but _august monarch_, etc.; not Paris--_the capital of the kingdom_. There are places in which we ought to call Paris, Paris, and others in which we ought to call it the capital of the kingdom. SECTION I · ¶168
• The same meaning changes with the words which express it. Meanings receive their dignity from words instead of giving it to them. Examples should be sought.... SECTION I · ¶170
• No one calls another a Cartesian[17] but he who is one himself, a pedant but a pedant, a provincial but a provincial; and I would wager it was the printer who put it on the title of _Letters to a Provincial_. SECTION I · ¶174
• A carriage _upset_ or _overturned_, according to the meaning _To spread abroad_ or _upset_, according to the meaning. (The argument by force of M. le Maître[18] over the friar.) SECTION I · ¶176
• _Miscellaneous._--A form of speech, "I should have liked to apply myself to that." SECTION I · ¶178
• The _aperitive_ virtue of a key, the _attractive_ virtue of a hook. SECTION I · ¶180
• To guess: "The part that I take in your trouble." The Cardinal[19] did not want to be guessed. SECTION I · ¶182
• "My mind is disquieted." _I am disquieted_ is better. SECTION I · ¶183
• I always feel uncomfortable under such compliments as these: "I have given you a great deal of trouble," "I am afraid I am boring you," "I fear this is too long." We either carry our audience with us, or irritate them. SECTION I · ¶185
• You are ungraceful: "Excuse me, pray." Without that excuse I would not have known there was anything amiss. "With reverence be it spoken ...." The only thing bad is their excuse. SECTION I · ¶187
• "To extinguish the torch of sedition"; too luxuriant. "The restlessness of his genius"; two superfluous grand words. SECTION I · ¶189
• _First part_: Misery of man without God. SECTION II · ¶192
• _Second part_: Happiness of man with God. SECTION II · ¶193
• Or, _First part_: That nature is corrupt. Proved by nature itself. SECTION II · ¶194
• _Second part_: That there is a Redeemer. Proved by Scripture. SECTION II · ¶195
• _Preface to the first part._--To speak of those who have treated of the knowledge of self; of the divisions of Charron,[21] which sadden and weary us; of the confusion of Montaigne;[22] that he was quite aware of his want of method, and shunned it by jumping from subject to subject; that he sought to be fashionable. SECTION II · ¶199
• It is not in Montaigne, but in myself, that I find all that I see in him. SECTION II · ¶204
• What good there is in Montaigne can only have been acquired with difficulty. The evil that is in him, I mean apart from his morality, could have been corrected in a moment, if he had been informed that he made too much of trifles and spoke too much of himself. SECTION II · ¶206
• One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life, and there is nothing better. SECTION II · ¶208
• _The vanity of the sciences._--Physical science will not console me for the ignorance of morality in the time of affliction. But the science of ethics will always console me for the ignorance of the physical sciences. SECTION II · ¶210
• Men are never taught to be gentlemen, and are taught everything else; and they never plume themselves so much on the rest of their knowledge as on knowing how to be gentlemen. They only plume themselves on knowing the one thing they do not know. SECTION II · ¶212
• _The infinites, the mean._--When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing. SECTION II · ¶214
• _Nature_ ...--[Nature has set us so well in the centre, that if we change one side of the balance, we change the other also. _I act._ Τά ζῶα τρέχει. This makes me believe that the springs in our brain are so adjusted that he who touches one touches also its contrary.] SECTION II · ¶216
• Too much and too little wine. Give him none, he cannot find truth; give him too much, the same. SECTION II · ¶218
• Of these two Infinites of science, that of greatness is the most palpable, and hence a few persons have pretended to know all things. "I will speak of the whole,"[31] said Democritus. SECTION II · ¶227
• Let us then take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the Nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the Infinite. SECTION II · ¶230
• Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature. SECTION II · ¶231
• Let us therefore not look for certainty and stability. Our reason is always deceived by fickle shadows; nothing can fix the finite between the two Infinites, which both enclose and fly from it. SECTION II · ¶234
• In comparison with these Infinites all finites are equal, and I see no reason for fixing our imagination on one more than on another. The only comparison which we make of ourselves to the finite is painful to us. SECTION II · ¶236
• Instead of receiving the ideas of these things in their purity, we colour them with our own qualities, and stamp with our composite being all the simple things which we contemplate. SECTION II · ¶243

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