“We run carelessly to the precipice after we have put up a façade to prevent ourselves from seeing it.”
Blaise Pascal
“Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.”
Blaise Pascal
“Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.”
Blaise Pascal
“Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?”
Blaise Pascal
“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
Blaise Pascal, Pensées
“All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.”
Blaise Pascal
Thank you for these well-selected, timely lines from Blaise Pascal, one of the foundational thinkers of modern France and of our Western worldview. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal]
We read only a little of his writings when I was in HS and college, but I was always struck by their pithy insights. However, in spite of being told that he was a deeply religious man, I found the comment known as Pascal’s Wager to be at least ironic, if not cynical.