"Pascal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... glad of it. I would rather tell you myself. My father has, today, laid his commands on me to marry the Sieur de Pascal." ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty
... SASSOU-NGUESSO (since 25 October 1997, following the civil war in which he toppled elected president Pascal LISSOUBA); head of government: Prime Minister Isidore MVOUBA (since 7 January 2005) cabinet: Council of Ministers appointed by the president elections: president elected by popular vote for a seven-year term (eligible for a second term); election last held 10 March 2002 (next ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... in bed, over the little white volume of Pascal which went with her everywhere, "whether it is really good for a woman to live with a man who is morally her superior, as Richard is mine. It makes one so dependent. I suppose I feel for him what my mother and women of her generation felt for Christ. It just shows that one can't ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... extension and multiplication. Our finest modern canals are scarcely smaller, and certainly capable of more uninterrupted, safe and heavy navigation, than many of the rivers which have figured in history, and which Pascal so graphically described as "moving roads that carry us whither ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... Mariage de Figaro, Dante's Inferno, Petrarch's Sonnets, all the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the romances of the Middle Ages, the History of France, and of Rome, etc., etc. Excepting Bossuet's Histoire des Variations and Pascal's Provinciales, I do not think there are many books left to read if you insist on eliminating all those in which illicit love ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... by M. Pascal, in the ninth of his "Lettres Provinciales." Consult also "the Life of Melancthon," by the author of ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... charming than chastened, come thickly from the first; on the rosy flowery unguarded slopes, where trespasses ripen into errors full of equivocal effervescence, into too palpitating issues. The anecdote puts La Palferine's genius before you in all its vivacity and completeness. He realizes Pascal's entre-deux, he comprehends the whole scale between tenderness and pitilessness, and, like Epaminondas, he is equally great in extremes. And not merely so, his epigram stamps the epoch; the accoucheur is a modern innovation. All the refinements ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... the whole hemisphere appears to be in storm and tempest." And raising his thoughts higher and higher, reducing his own suffering to what it was in the immensity of nature, seeing there not only himself but whole kingdoms as mere specks in the infinite, he added in words which foreshadowed Pascal, in words whose outline and salient points Pascal did not disdain to borrow: "But whoever shall represent to his fancy, as in a picture, that great image of our mother nature, portrayed in her full majesty and lustre, whoever in her face shall read so general and so ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... he does not seem able to say: his ideas do not go beyond retail trade, his mind having been so long closed to all other impressions that it appears incapable of thought or reflection on any subject besides. Pascal says, "L'homme est visiblement fait pour penser. C'est toute sa dignite et tout son merite;" but to Mr. Ruby the ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... plod on, laboriously proving God, although, even to Saint Bernard and Pascal, God was incapable of proof; and using such material as the books furnish for help. It is not much. The French have been shockingly negligent of their greatest artistic glory. One knows not even where to seek. One must go to the National Library and beg ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... characteristic, the psychical aptitudes. That the Chimpanzee and the hideous Gorilla possess close resemblances of structure to our own is obvious. But let us for a moment consider their aptitudes. What differences, what a dividing gulf! Without exalting ourselves as high as the famous reed of which Pascal speaks, that reed which, in its weakness, by the mere fact that it knows itself to be crushed, is superior to the world that crushes it, we may at least ask to be shown, somewhere, an animal making an implement, which will multiply its skill ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... was then organising and organising—let me ask you not for a moment to forget—with a specific eye, not so much to the "principles of 1789," about which our worthy ministers care as much as they do about the Edict of Nantes or the philosophy of Pascal, as to the Legislative ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... A {{Pascal}}-descended language that has been made mandatory for Department of Defense software projects by the Pentagon. Hackers are nearly unanimous in observing that, technically, it is precisely what one might expect given that kind of endorsement ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... when confined within just limits, concerns the mathematician, the experimenter, and the statesman. From the time when Pascal and Fermat established its first principles, it has rendered most important daily services. This it is which, after suggesting the best form for statistical tables of population and mortality, teaches us to deduce from those numbers, so often ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... connaissant votre condition naturelle, usez des moyens qui lui sont propres, et ne pretendez pas regner par une autre voie que par celle qui vous fait roi.*—PASCAL. ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book II • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... rational mechanics could not be disentangled. In hydrostatics, Stevinus had extended and applied the discovery of Archimedes. Torricelli had proved atmospheric pressure, "by showing that this pressure sustained different liquids at heights inversely proportional to their densities;" and Pascal "established the necessary diminution of this pressure at increasing heights in the atmosphere:" discoveries which in part reduced this branch of science to a quantitative form. Something had been done by Daniel ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... vanity." ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon's wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing graveyards, and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly;—not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... have become more classical in modern literature than that of Blaise Pascal. There is hardly any name more famous at once in literature, science, and religion. Cut off at the early age of thirty-nine—the fatal age of genius—he had long before attained pre-eminent distinction as a geometer ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... Protestant with the Bible. He could have re-written 'Sir Charles Grandison' from memory if every copy had been lost. Now it might perhaps be plausibly maintained that the possession of such a memory is unfavourable to a high development of the reasoning powers. The case of Pascal, indeed, who is said never to have forgotten anything, shows that the two powers may co-exist; and other cases might of course be mentioned. But it is true that a powerful memory may enable a man to save himself the trouble of reasoning. It encourages the indolent propensity of deciding difficulties ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... conscience, shifting the onus of responsibility on to others, and agreeing to believe, as it were, by proxy. She had plunged fearlessly and headlong into Aristotle, Bacon, Locke, Condillac, Mably, Leibnitz, Bossuet, Pascal, Montaigne, Montesquieu; beginning to call many things in question, and, through the darkness and confusion into which she was sometimes thrown, trying honestly and sincerely to feel her way to some ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... In the early years of the seventeenth century—that wonderful epoch in the history of the world which produced a Galileo, a Kepler, a Tycho Brahe, a Descartes, a Desargues, a Pascal, a Cavalieri, a Wallis, a Fermat, a Huygens, a Bacon, a Napier, and a goodly array of lesser lights, to say nothing of a Rembrandt or of a Shakespeare—there began to appear certain unifying principles connecting the great mass of ...
— An Elementary Course in Synthetic Projective Geometry • Lehmer, Derrick Norman
... with more wit than his book. I saw nothing novel either in the historical part relating to the morals of nations (in which Helvetius dismisses us as triflers), or in the position that morality is dependent on the reason. All that he says has been said over and over again, and Blaise Pascal went much farther, but he wrote more skilfully and better in every way than Helvetius, who, wishing to remain in France, was obliged to retract. He preferred a quiet life to his honour and his philosophy. His wife had a nobler soul ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... through it the reader will specially be struck by this instructive fact, that the bitterness and violence of the controversy were always in the inverse ratio of the importance of the points at issue. This much also must any fair mind allow: the Society of Jesus, since the days of Pascal and the "Provincial Letters," has been regarded as a synonym for dishonesty and fraud. From any such charge the student of the "Acta Sanctorum" must regard the Bollandists as free. In them we behold oftentimes a credulity which would not have found place among men who knew by experience ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... saints,—a beatitude, but without any sign of joy, earnest, solitary, even sad; "the flight," Plotinus called it, "of the alone to the alone." The trances of Socrates, Plotinus, Porphyry, Behmen, Bunyan, Fox, Pascal, Guion, Swedenborg, will readily come to mind. But what as readily comes to mind, is the accompaniment of disease. This beatitude comes in terror, and with shocks to the mind of the receiver. "It o'erinforms the tenement ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... No doubt, as Pascal has so eloquently said, "it is in this abyss that the problem of our condition gathers its complications and intricacies, so that man is more inconceivable without this mystery than this mystery is inconceivable to man;" but the truth of the fall and of original sin is one of those against ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... but a shadowy consideration in comparison to the demands of the individual soul. Food is almost the first pre-requisite; and yet a high character will go without food to the ruin and death of the body rather than gain it in a manner which the spirit disavows. Pascal laid aside mathematics; Origen doctored his body with a knife; every day some one is thus mortifying his dearest interests and desires, and, in Christ's words, entering maim into the Kingdom of Heaven. This is to supersede the lesser and less harmonious ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... failure to apply a principle which was characteristic of his mode of thought, that even a statement about a virtue like veracity "hath limit as all things else have;" but it is odd to find Bacon bringing against the Puritans the converse of the charge which his age, and Pascal afterwards, brought against the Jesuits. The essay, besides being a picture of the times as regards religion, is an example of what was to be Bacon's characteristic strength and weakness: his strength in lifting up a subject which had been ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... appeared his favorite passage from Pascal, used previously on the title page of the Enquiry: "Ceux qui sont capables d'inventer sont rares: ceux qui n'inventent point sont en plus grand nombre, et par consequent les plus forts." The first few pages of the Essay enlarge ...
— John Baptist Jackson - 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut • Jacob Kainen
... pulled up and from it a man leant over. The priest recognised him—he was an uncle of his, Doctor Pascal Rougon, or Monsieur Pascal, as the poor folk of Plassans, whom he attended for nothing, briefly styled him. Although barely over fifty, he was already snowy white, with a big beard and abundant hair, amidst which his handsome regular features took ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... the subject of much curious speculation, it remained unproductive of results until a comparatively recent period, when the idea occurred of applying it to mechanical purposes. A machine of the kind was indeed proposed by Pascal, the eminent philosopher, in 1664, but more than a century elapsed before the difficulties in the way of its construction were satisfactorily overcome. Bramah's machine consists of a large and massive cylinder, in which there works an accurately-fitted solid piston or plunger. ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... great-grandmother. He is, indeed, the son of Gervaise, the heroine of L'Assommoir ('The Dram Shop'), by her lover Lantier. And Gervaise, it may be remembered, was the daughter of Antoine Macquart (of 'The Fortune of the Rougons' and 'Dr. Pascal'), the latter being the illegitimate son of Adelaide Fouque, from whom sprang the insanity of the Rougon-Macquarts. At the same time, whatever view may be taken of Claude's artistic theories, whatever interest his ultimate fate may ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... Lucian, Plutarch, and Diogenes Laertius. Among the moderns, La Rochefoucauld, Saint-Evremond, and La Bruyere are admired by all judicious readers. From these French writers Boyer has selected materials for the groundwork of his collection. He has added passages from Antoninus, Pascal, and Gratian; from the English authors Bacon, Cowley, L'Estrange, Raleigh, Temple, Dryden, Wycherley, Brown and others; and from his own pen. They range from a single line to a passage of several pages. Those of English origin are distinguished by "an Asterism," his own remarks by ...
— The Present State of Wit (1711) - In A Letter To A Friend In The Country • John Gay
... with his usual liveliness, "We shall never again behold the time, when a Duke de la Rochefoucault might go from the conversation of a Pascal or Arnauld, to the theatre of Corneille." This reflection may be more justly applied to the ancients, and it may with much greater truth be said; "The age will never again return, when a Pericles, after walking with ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... of the Poem Expostulations of M. Dumon Jasmin's Defence of the Gascon Dialect Jasmin and Dante 'Franconnette' dedicated to Toulouse Outline of the Story Marshal Montluc Huguenots Castle of Estellac Marcel and Pascal The Buscou 'The Syren with a Heart of Ice' The Sorcerer Franconnette accursed Festival on Easter Morning The Crown Piece Storm at Notre Dame The Villagers determine to burn Franconnette ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... press which faced the windows, Dr. Pascal was looking for a paper that he had come in search of. With doors wide open, this immense press of carved oak, adorned with strong and handsome mountings of metal, dating from the last century, displayed within its capacious depths an extraordinary collection of papers and manuscripts ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... Theodora and Ellen had with mug-bread on one occasion, when Gram was away from home. Aunt Nabbie and Uncle Pascal Mowbray came on from Philadelphia while she and the ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... Tanjong. Parliament, Tartar. Parpa iron mines. Parrot, Professor, first to ascend Mount Ararat. Parrots. Partridges, black; Jirufti; great (Chakors); in mew. (See also Francolin.). Parwana, a traitor eaten by the Tartars. Paryan silver mines. Pascal of Vittoria, Friar. Pasei, Pacem (Basma), a kingdom of Sumatra. —— Bay of. —— History of. Pasha-Afroz. Pasha and Pashagar tribes. Pashai, what region intended. —— Dir. Passo (or Pace), Venetian. Patarins, heretics. Patera, debased Greek, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... then place Emerson among the great poets. But I go farther, and say that I do not place him among the great writers, the great men of letters. Who are the great men of letters? They are men like Cicero, Plato, Bacon, Pascal, Swift, Voltaire—writers with, in the first place, a genius and instinct for style.... Brilliant and powerful passages in a man's writings do not prove his possession of it. Emerson has passages of noble and pathetic eloquence; he has passages of shrewd ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... referred to above is Pascal, an early cultivator of mathematical probability, and obviously too much enamoured of his new pursuit. But he conceives himself bound to wager on one side or the other. To the argument (Pensees, ch. 7)[155] that "le juste est de ne point parier," he answers, "Oui: mais ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... nearly two months now since it had been known all through the place that Adam Pascal was keeping company with his cousin Eve, and the Polperro folk, one and all, agreed that no good could surely come of a courtship carried on after such a contrary fashion; for the two were never for twenty-four hours in the same mind, and the game of love seemed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... loathsome. That Ave Maria—Grand Dieu! But Frederic Chopin, nuance, cadence, appoggiatura—there you have it. En amour, les vieux fous sont plus fous que les jeunes. Listen to Rochefoucauld! And Montaigne has said, C'est le jouir et non le posseder qui rend heureux. And Pascal has added, Les affaires sont les affaires. As for Stendhal, Flaubert, Nietzsche, Edgar Saltus, Balzac, Gautier, Dostoievsky, Rabelais, Maupassant, Anatole France, Bourget, Turgenev, Verlaine, Renan, Walter Pater, Landor, Cardinal Newman and ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... about this time that Rochefort, who had escaped from New Caledonia with Pascal Grousset (died 1909), came to London, and I saw them. I afterwards quarrelled with Rochefort, or rather ceased to see him, for I had seen him only this once, because of his behaviour towards Gambetta, who had been ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... in those nations some of the gravest men. In England, Swift and Addison; in Spain, Cervantes. Rabelais and La Fontaine are recorded by their countrymen to have been reveurs. Few men have been graver than Pascal; few ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... himself. He was Pope as Leo X. at thirty-seven. Luther robbed even him of his richest province at thirty-five. Take Ignatius Loyola and John Wesley, they worked with young brains. Ignatius was only thirty when he made his pilgrimage and wrote the "Spiritual Exercises." Pascal wrote a great work at sixteen, and died at thirty-seven, ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... at the Reception and Ball given by Max Pascal and Little Whity, at Tutonia Hall, Tuesday evening, ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... weighed, but from light baffling winds it was some time before we cleared the islands. The tide however swept us out and drifted us half a mile to windward of a small peaked island which must be the Pascal Island of the French: this islet is of small size but remarkable for its conical shape and having, as it were, its apex cut off. It is surrounded by a rocky shoal ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... Lewis and I were chatting in one corner on interests specially feminine, the Dominie had got Mr. Remington into a metaphysical discussion of some length. From time to time we heard, "Pascal's idea seems to be," and then, "The notion of Descartes and all that school of thinkers"; and feeling that they were plunging quite beyond our depth, we continued babbling of dry goods, and what was becoming, till Mr. Remington leaned ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... still exists, possessing flat buttresses of a Norman type at the angles and between the windows, but the pointed arches indicate Transition work. There is a lovely fragment of carved work still preserved in the chapter-house, representing the pascal lamb slain and surrounded by a wreath of foliage, above which are the letters I.H.S. The vine leaves flowing from the lamb may symbolise the branches springing from ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... perfume; and the people have still brown comely faces; and the Pharmacie Gros still dispenses English medicines; and the invalids (eheu!) still sit on the promenade and trifle with their fingers in the fringes of shawls and wrappers; and the shop of Pascal Amarante still, in its present bright consummate flower of aggrandisement and new paint, offers everything that it has entered into people's hearts to wish for in the idleness of a sanatorium; and the "Chateau des Morts" is still ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in silent moments, when the senses are tired and disappointment steals over us, the truth of the insignificance of things bursts upon us. "Man is but a reed, the feeblest thing in nature," says Pascal in the Pensees, "but he is a thinking reed. The universe need not mass its forces to accomplish his destruction. A breath, a drop of water may destroy him. But even though the world should fall and crush him he would still be more noble ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... Pascal Paoli was the Garibaldi of his day. When his father in 1738 had been driven from the island by the French, he had retired with him to Naples where he entered a military college and followed the profession of ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... will appeal to Bosseux, to Fenelon, Raceri, Boilleau, Pascal, and others of the reign of Louis XIV. I fancy I hear ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... very agreeable; for the abbe was the most amiable man in the world, the most witty, and above all, the most obliging. The following is an historical fact, which requires the bitter and vengeful irony of Moliere or Pascal to do it justice. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... course of this admirable writing had a considerable effect upon my own; and I added to it by the assiduous reading of other writers, both French and English, who combined, in a remarkable degree, ease with force, such as Goldsmith, Fielding, Pascal, Voltaire, and Courier. Through these influences my writing lost the jejuneness of my early compositions; the bones and cartilages began to clothe themselves with flesh, and the style became, at times, lively and ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... President Lt. Gen. Idriss DEBY Itno (since 4 December 1990) head of government: Prime Minister Pascal YOADIMNADJI (since 3 February 2005) cabinet: Council of State, members appointed by the president on the recommendation of the prime minister elections: president elected by popular vote to serve five-year ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... is infamous; that authorized Marseillaise, a sacrilege. Men are ferocious and conceited brutes; we are in the HALF AS MUCH of Pascal; when will ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... contemporary of Descartes, is renowned for his Provencal Letters, a book that has become a classic in France. It is full of wit, and of exquisite beauty of language; but its teaching is pure sophistry. Pascal first set the example of writing about religion in a tone of mock levity, especially when by so doing, he could abuse the Jesuits. In the end this weapon of keen and delicate satire was turned against Christianity itself, when Voltaire in the eighteenth ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... as wise as the son? quoth my uncle Toby:—I should think not, said Yorick:—But what are these, continued my father—(breaking out in a kind of enthusiasm)—what are these, to those prodigies of childhood in Grotius, Scioppius, Heinsius, Politian, Pascal, Joseph Scaliger, Ferdinand de Cordoue, and others—some of which left off their substantial forms at nine years old, or sooner, and went on reasoning without them;—others went through their classics ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... however, partly supported him by an annual income of twelve hundred francs. He was educated at the college Mazarin, and surprised his Jansenist teachers by his brilliance and precocity. They believed him to be a second Pascal; and, doubtless to complete the analogy, drew his attention away from his theological studies to geometry. But they calculated without their host; for the young student suddenly found out his genius, and mathematics and the exact sciences henceforth became ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Wherever a few great minds have made a stand against violence and fraud, in the cause of liberty and reason, there has been her spirit in the midst of them; inspiring, encouraging, consoling;—by the lonely lamp of Erasmus, by the restless bed of Pascal, in the tribune of Mirabeau, in the cell of Galileo, on the ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... taste of the age of Malebranche, the master of Addison, and of Boileau, the master of Pope, will appear ridiculous to an Englishman. To accuse the vicious style which prevailed in the age of Bossuet, Fenelon, and Pascal, will appear monstrous to every one with the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... Pascal, "let him estimate himself at his true value, honour himself in his capacities, and despise himself in his neglect of those capacities." Yes, if a man is once brought to this condition that he feels the greatness of the ends for which God has made ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... come into ever-increasing use, not merely for dealing with large masses of figures in banks, insurance offices, &c., but also, as cash registers, for use on the counters of retail shops. They may be classified as follows:—(i.) Addition machines; the first invented by Blaise Pascal (1642). (ii.) Addition machines modified to facilitate multiplication; the first by G.W. Leibnitz (1671). (iii.) True multiplication machines; Leon Bolles (1888), Steiger (1894). (iv.) Difference machines; Johann Helfrich von ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... philosophy of life, dated in two places, to which I devote a chapter and which I refer to as the Notebook. This book is as important in studying Chesterton as the Pensees would be for a student of Pascal. He is here already a master of phrase in a sense which makes a comparison with Pascal especially apt. For he often packs so much meaning into a brilliant sentence or two that I have felt it worth while, in dealing especially ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... to follow out in detail. Sometimes only, when the original resemblance in character of intellect is very marked in two individuals, and they are submitted to definitely contrary circumstances of education, an approximation to evidence may be obtained. Thus Bacon and Pascal appear to be men naturally very similar in their temper and powers of mind. One, born in York House, Strand, of courtly parents, educated in court atmosphere, and replying, almost as soon as he could speak, to the queen asking how old ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... and sexual connection plays an important part in his teaching and prophesies. The apostle St. Paul was also a visionary who passed suddenly from one extreme to another as the result of hallucination. Pascal, Napoleon, and Rousseau presented very ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... Blaise Pascal, and about the two works on which his fame is founded, everything that there is to say had been said. The details of his life are as fully known as we can expect to know them; his mathematical and physical discoveries have been treated many times; his religious ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... in the year 470 B.C., the son of a poor sculptor, he devoted his life to the search after truth for its own sake, and sought to base it on immutable foundations. He was the mortal enemy of the Sophists, whom he encountered, as Pascal did the Jesuits, with wit, irony, puzzling questions, and remorseless logic. It is true that Socrates and his great successors Plato and Aristotle were called "Sophists," but only as all philosophers or wise men were so called. The Sophists as a class had incurred the odium of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... covers. An extravagance that—for it cost me some sovereigns—but it is something to have the portraits of all that wonderful galaxy, of Louis, of the devout Maintenon, of the frail Montespan, of Bossuet, Fenelon, Moliere, Racine, Pascal, Conde, Turenne, and all the saints and sinners of the age. If you want to make yourself a present, and chance upon a copy of "The Court and Times of Louis XIV.," you will never think that ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... lotteries, &c., but also the determination of future events from observations made relative to events of the same nature. This subject of inquiry dates only from the 17th century, and occupied the minds of Pascal, Huygens, Fermot, Bernouilli, Laplace, Fourier, Lacroix, Poisson, De Moivre; and in more modern times, Cournot, ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... pursuit turned out to be long and tortuous, leading at last to the vast forests of scholastic science. From Zeno to Descartes, hand in hand with Thomas Aquinas, Montaigne, and Pascal, one stumbled as stupidly as though one were still a German student of 1860. Only with the instinct of despair could one force one's self into this old thicket of ignorance after having been repulsed a score of entrances more promising and more ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... satisfactory as to the purposes of curiosity, or any other: and, indeed, it answers the purposes of the former in several respects which it would not do if it were as over-bearing as is required.'* Or as Pascal beautifully puts it:—'There is light enough for those whose sincere wish is to see,—and darkness enough to confound those of ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... never should have blamed him if he had really gone to Wimbledon Church, with the feelings of a good Catholic, to worship the host. Dr. Nares speaks in several places with just severity of the sophistry of the Jesuits, and with just admiration of the incomparable letters of Pascal. It is somewhat strange, therefore, that he should adopt, to the full extent, the jesuitical doctrine ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of successful villany and rampant vice, but few listened to their warnings. They were jeered at by the vulgar, fined, imprisoned, or banished by Ministers and Magistrates. All that was good, noble, and generous in the nation withered in the uncongenial atmosphere. The language of Pascal and of Corneille became the medium of corrupting the minds of millions. The events of the day were some actress who had discovered a new way to outrage decency, or some new play which deified a prostitute ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... in describing a certain type of mind: "Il est d'heureux esprits, des mes fortes et saines, que n'effraie point le silence ternel des espaces infinis o s'anantissait la raison de Pascal. Naves et robustes natures, mles et vigoureux penseurs, qui gardent toute la vie quelque chose des dons charmants de la jeunesse et de l'enfance mme, une foi vive dans le tmoinage immdiat de nos sens ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... Buxton, Wilberforce, Pascal, Handel, Canova, Dr. Chalmers, and many others. Providence opened before them the path to which their ...
— The Printer Boy. - Or How Benjamin Franklin Made His Mark. An Example for Youth. • William M. Thayer
... back, whilst she could only see its dark, shapeless shadow. Her self-confidence was going, and her culture was so useless. What good was it to her now to know really well the writings of Burke, or Macaulay—nay, of Racine and Pascal? She had never been religious since her childhood, but in these long, solitary days in the great house that grew more and more gloomy as she passed about it when Molly was out, she began to feel new needs and to seek for ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... superstition. The heat of their imagination sometimes only serves to lead them the farther astray, and to attach them to opinions which would cause them to blush did they but consult their reason. Pascal constantly imagined that he saw hell yawning under his feet; Mallebranche was extravagantly credulous; Hobbes had a great terror of phantoms and demons;[3] and the immortal Newton wrote a ridiculous commentary on the vials and visions of the Apocalypse. In a word, every thing proves that there ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... earnestly and convincingly, but not oratorically. President Wilson is a very convincing speaker, but he indulges in no oratory. The one who makes a great effort to be eloquent always fails. Noise and fury and over-emphasis are not eloquent. "True eloquence," says Pascal, ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... sum. The light was failing rapidly, and Wilhelmine felt intensely dreary and sad. She turned over the leaves of the book which lay on her lap; it was a volume lent her by Monsieur Gabriel, a book written by Blaise Pascal. Her eye was caught by a sentence, and she read the wise words of the great thinker: 'Love hath its reasons which reason knoweth not.' Again her attention wandered from the page; her thoughts were busy with the possibilities of her destiny. With bitterness she realised that, for ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... greatness lies not in national idiosyncrasies, but in the personality of the artist, and in the single, the unique quality of the particular works of art, and these belong not to this country or nation or to that, but to us all. It is not to Frenchmen only that the intellectual passion of Pascal, or the hatred of shams and the love of the honest man of Moliere or of Voltaire, appeal, but to us all. It is not only Germans who understand the splendour of human experience, and the infinite pathos of the mistakes of the human heart, but we all. And the spectacle of the tempest in the ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... ardent cities of Renaissance Italy, where Da Vinci, Raphael, Michel Angelo, and Titian flourished in the same space of thirty years. It was so in the France of Louis Quatorze, when Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Pascal, and numbers of others of hardly smaller note, were writing side by side. And it was so in the times of great Elizabeth. According to Emerson there is a mental zymosis or contagion prevailing in society at such epochs. Some one has said that "No member of either ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... ourselves about where the Comic spirit would place us, if we stand at middle distance between the inveterate opponents and the drum-and-fife supporters of Comedy: 'Comme un point fixe fait remarquer l'emportement des autres,' as Pascal says. And were there more in this position, Comic genius ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Pascal says, "It is dangerous to show a man too clearly how closely he resembles the brute without showing him at the same time his greatness. It is equally dangerous to impress upon him his greatness without his lowliness. It is still more dangerous to leave ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... much more for the world to come, by every act we perform, by every word we speak, almost by every breath we draw. Butler is one of the most terrible authors in the world. He stands on our nearest shelf with Dante on one side of him and Pascal on the other. He is indeed terrible, but it is with a terror that purifies the heart and keeps the life in the hour of temptation. Paul sometimes arms himself with the same terror; only he composes in another style than that of Butler, and, with all his vivid intensity, he ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... and it was to Port-Royal that the greatest women of France went, either to find repose for their souls or to visit the noble members of their sex who had consecrated their lives to God—Mere Angelique, Jacqueline Pascal. Never in the history of the world had a religious sect or party gathered within its fold such an array of great minds, such a number of fearless and determined heroines and esprits d'elite. A short account of this famous convent must precede any ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... losing an obole of it, the heritage of the Greek Sophists. They involve in fact in the same proscription Socrates and Jesus Christ, Paul of Tarsus and Plato of Athens: they have no more respect for the opinions of Descartes and Leibnitz than for those of Pascal and Bossuet. The great question of the day is to know whether our desire of truth is a chimaera; whether our effort to reach the divine world is a spring into the empty void. When the question relates to God, inasmuch as He is the basis of reason ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... for some time, and soon afterward more than one hundred were at Paris, sold at ten Louis-d'or apiece. A dying priest accusing himself of having professed and taught the Christian religion, made a deeper impression upon the mind than the "Thoughts of Pascal." ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... principles of the gospel of Christ. As a means of a higher and truer confession of Christ, they sought a colleague for their pastor, Etienne Negrin (who was from the valleys), from Geneva. A young Piedmontese, Jean Louis Pascal, was just then finishing his studies at Lausanne. Brought up as a papist and a soldier, he renounced his former creed and profession for that of the gospel of Christ. Nor was it without cost of another kind he undertook the perilous ...
— The Vaudois of Piedmont - A Visit to their Valleys • John Napper Worsfold
... character which, the Jesuits said, were to be found in the works of Cornelius Jansenius, umquhile Bishop of Ypres, but which, the Jansenists asserted, were not to be found in anything Jansenius had ever written. And in the attempt to decide this simple question of fact, as Pascal calls it, the School of the Sorbonne and the Court of the Inquisition were completely baffled; and zealous Roman Catholics heard without conviction the verdict of councils, and failed to acquiesce in the judgment of ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... in mid-stream. A topographical feature like this is often found in the great depots of commerce and industry. No doubt the first inhabitants were influenced by the easy means of transport which the swift currents of the rivers offered them—those "roads which walk along of their own accord," as Pascal puts it. In the case of the Rhone, it would be the ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... Pascal's father determined that his son should teach the dead languages, but the voice of mathematics drowned every other call, haunting the boy until he laid aside his ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... Pragmatism, however, is that from the side of religion. The Pragmatic method of deciding religious problems, which asserts the legitimacy of a 'Faith' that precedes knowledge, has always been, more or less consciously, practised by the religious. It is brilliantly advocated in the Thoughts of Pascal, and clearly and forcibly defended in that most remarkable essay in unprofessional philosophy, Cardinal Newman's Grammar of Assent. This line of reasoning, however, is most familiarly associated with the name of William James; he first illustrated the Pragmatic Method ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... regarded as the product of deception or as an aberration of the human spirit; it now is established as a natural element in a fully developed personality. A psychological literary critic, Sainte Beuve, writes: "You may not cease to be a skeptic after reading Pascal; but you must cease to treat believers with contempt." William James has given us a great quantity of Varieties of Religious Experience, and he deals with all ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... chose qui s'offre a l' Homme quand il se regarde, c'est son corps," says Pascal, and looking at the matter more closely we find that it was the strange and mysterious things of his body that occupied man's earliest as well as much of his later attention. In the beginning, the organs and functions ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... issue I am, and I don't care who knows it, I said recklessly. And I hate these attempts to drag in prejudice. Moreover, I would beg you to observe that it was a great Frenchman, none other than Pascal, who paid the highest of all tributes to the dog. "The more I see of men," he said, "the better I like dogs." I challenge you to produce from any French source such an encomium ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... Pascal had the words engraved upon his seal; Canon Ainger left instructions that they should be inscribed on his tomb at Darley Abbey; but, like Donal Grant, Michael Faraday wove them into the very warp and woof, the fiber and fabric of his ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... it. Sir John Herschel and Sir Wm. Thompson, among astronomers, have proclaimed its antagonism to the facts of physical astronomy. No new facts subversive of the foundations of faith in God as recognized in the universe by Bacon, Newton, Boyle, Descartes, Leibnitz, Pascal, Paley and Bell, have been discovered by such scientists as Whewell, Sedgwick, Brewster, Faraday, Hugh Miller, or our American geologists, Dawson, Hitchcock, and Dana. Nor have the deliberate and expanded demonstrations of its unscientific character by the late lamented ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... Thomas Buxton loved dogs, horses, and literature, and combined these while riding on an old horse. At sixteen be fell in love with an older literary woman, which aroused every latent power to do or die, and thereafter he took all the school prizes. Scott began to like poetry at thirteen. Pascal wrote treatises on conic sections at sixteen and invented his arithmetical machine at nineteen. Nelson went to sea at twelve; commanded a boat in peril at fifteen, which at the same age he left to fight ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... walls with several engravings—one of a marshal of France on a spirited steed, with his baton in his hand. Above the commode were the photographs of the family, arranged in two lines, with an antique china benitier between. On the corners of the commode a bust of Pascal faced another of Beranger—one grave, the other smiling. It was, indeed, a ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... make it easier for some to conceive that his influence on Shakspere could be so potent as has been above asserted. Among those whom we know him to have acted upon in the highest degree—setting aside the disputed case of Bacon—are Pascal, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Flaubert, Emerson, and Thoreau. In the case of Pascal, despite his uneasy assumption that his philosophy was contrary to Montaigne's, the influence went so far that the Pensees again and again ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... 21. 3. Conc. t. 6 & 7, ed. Labbe. 4. Hist. de France in Charlem. French edit. in fol. 5. Ceillier, pp. 376 & 400. 6. Pagi (in Breviario Rom. Pontif. t. 3, in Alex. III. p. 82) proves that suffrages for the soul of Charlemagne were continued at Aix-la-Chapelle, till the antipope Pascal, at the desire of Frederic Barbarossa, enshrined his remains in that city, and published a decree for his canonization. From the time of this enshrining of his remains, he is honored among the saints ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... Second Empire," extending to a score of volumes, was doubtless suggested to M. Zola by Balzac's immortal "Comedie Humaine." He was twenty-eight years of age when this idea first occurred to him; he was fifty-three when he at last sent the manuscript of his concluding volume, "Dr. Pascal," to the press. He had spent five-and-twenty years in working out his scheme, persevering with it doggedly and stubbornly, whatever rebuffs he might encounter, whatever jeers and whatever insults might be directed against him by the ignorant, the prejudiced, and the hypocritical. Truth was ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola |
