Work
Pensées
"Blaise Pascal, the precociously brilliant contemporary of Descartes, was a gifted mathematician and physicist, but it is his unfinished apologia for the Christian religion upon which his reputation now rests. The Pensees is a collection of philosophical fragments, notes and essays in which he explores the contradictions of human nature in psychological, social, metaphysical and, above all, theological terms. Mankind emerges from Pascal's analysis as a wretched and desolate creature within an impersonal universe, but also as a being whose existence can be transformed through faith in God's gra
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About this work
The Pensees are the unfinished notes Blaise Pascal left toward a defense of the Christian faith, published after his death in 1670. Fragmentary by accident, they read like lightning: short, piercing reflections on human greatness and misery, on reason and its limits, and on the famous wager about belief. Few unfinished books have been so complete.
About the author — Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal (1623 to 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher who, after a religious conversion, turned his formidable mind to questions of faith and the human condition. He died at thirty-nine, leaving the Pensees incomplete.
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People also ask
What is the Pensees by Pascal about?
Human nature and the case for faith. In fragments, Pascal examines our mix of grandeur and wretchedness, the limits of reason, and why he thinks belief is the rational wager.
What is the most famous quote from the Pensees?
That the heart has its reasons which reason itself does not know, his compact statement that the deepest human motives lie beyond pure logic.
Is the Pensees a complete work?
No. Pascal died before finishing it, so it survives as a collection of notes and fragments, which is part of why it reads so strikingly.