"Pascal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Bacon descended from his coach to stuff a fowl with snow to determine whether or not ice would preserve flesh. With his life the philosopher purchased for us the principle that does so much to preserve our fruits and foods through the summer's heat and lend us happiness and comfort. And Pascal, whose thoughts are the seeds that have sown many a mental life with harvests, bought his splendid ideas by burning up his brain. The professors who guided and loved him knew that the boy would soon be gone, just as those who light a candle ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... penetrated with Divine love, and enjoys the manifestations of God's blissful presence, is happy, let his outward condition be what it will. This world, this present state of things, is but for a time. What is now future will be present, as what is already past once was. And then, as Pascal observes, a little earth thrown on our cold head will for ever determine our hopes and condition. Nor will it signify much who personated the prince or the beggar, since, with respect to the exterior, all must stand on the same level ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... 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 popular. ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... demands of the individual soul. Food is almost the first prerequisite; 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 ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not explorers; if they said so, they lied. Caleb Kerney is one of the old band of Danites, as bloodthirsty and relentless as the worst of them. Colton Graves is the son of Pascal Graves, once a leader of the Destroying Angels—a man whose hands were dyed with innocent blood. They went forth, with others, to bring provisions from the settlements. All of the ...
— Frank Merriwell's Bravery • Burt L. Standish
... Pascal somewhere says: "In viewing the march of human evolution, the philosophic mind should look upon humanity as one man, and not as a ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... frequently and was struck with his "energy of style and boldness of hypothesis." Among the books which "may have remotely contributed to form the historian of the Roman Empire" were the Provincial Letters of Pascal, which he read "with a new pleasure" almost every year. From them he said, "I learned to manage the weapon of grave and temperate irony, even on subjects of ecclesiastical solemnity." As one thinks of his ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... Pascal laid down the essentials of logical method in the statement "Define everything and prove everything." In other words, do not attempt to think about a term until you have defined the term and have a clear idea what it means; and insist upon proving every statement at which ...
— How to Study • George Fillmore Swain
... friends listened in silence. Arnauld understood them. "I see quite well that you do not consider this document a good one for its purpose," said he, "and I think you are right; but you who are young," and he turned towards Pascal, who had a short time since retired to Port-Royal, "you ought to do something." This was the origin of the Lettres Provinciales. For the first time Pascal wrote, something other than a treatise on physics. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... historians. One half of the nation is always at variance with the other half. I have met with people who assured me that the Duke of Marlborough was a coward, and that Mr. Pope was a fool; just as some Jesuits in France declare Pascal to have been a man of little or no genius, and some Jansenists affirm Father Bourdaloue to have been a mere babbler. The Jacobites consider Mary Queen of Scots as a pious heroine, but those of an opposite party look upon her as ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... 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. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... 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 set forth Pascal's doctrine in passages taken almost literally ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... saints and mystics at the same time that he studied, and delighted in, Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, Goethe and Heine. For his taste has been catholic always; he admires Meredith as he admires Dickens, Hello and Pascal no less than Schopenhauer. And it is this catholicity, this open mind, this eager search for truth, that have enabled him to emerge from the mysticism that once enwrapped him to the clearer daylight of actual existence; it is this faculty of admiring all that is admirable in man and in life that ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... aspired to distinction in that way, beyond the confines of Siberia. Russia may produce many Karasmins to write glowing histories of her wars and conquests, but her Burkes, her Pitts, and her Foxes will be few, and her Shakspeares and her Bacons fewer still. Her Pascal's Reflections will be tinged with Siberian horrors; her Young's Night Thoughts will be of the dancing damsels of St. Petersburg; her Vicars of Wakefield will abound in the genial humor of devils and dragons, saints and tortures; and the wit of her Sidney Smiths will have a crack of the knout about ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... Pascal said, are "frightful." That way madness lies. And those who would be sane upon earth must drug themselves with the experience, or with the spectacle of the experience, of human passion. Within this charmed circle, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... sooner returned from banishment, than his refusal to do homage to the king raised a dispute, which Henry evaded at that critical juncture, by promising to send a messenger, in order to compound the matter with Pascal II., who then filled the papal throne. The messenger, as was probably foreseen, returned with an absolute refusal of the king's demands [y]; and that fortified by many reasons, which were well qualified to operate on the understandings of men in ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... noblest Christian character, have not availed to shield combatants. Christians like Isaac Newton, Pascal, Locke, Milton, and even Fenelon and Howard, have had this weapon hurled against them. Of all proofs of the existence of a God, those of Descartes have been wrought most thoroughly into the minds of modern men; yet the Protestant theologians of Holland sought ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the element of passion (both "passionate" in the English and "passionnel" in the French sense) and that of politics, there is a good deal of more abstract theology and philosophy, chiefly of the mixed kind, as represented in various authors from Pascal—indeed from ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... coat not change? The French of the nineteenth century can no more be the French of the eighteenth, than that is the French of the seventeenth, or than the French of the seventeenth is that of the sixteenth. Montaigne's language is not Rabelais's, Pascal's is not Montaigne's, Montesquieu's is not Pascal's. Each of the four languages, taken by itself, is admirable because it is original. Every age has its own ideas; it must have also words adapted ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... "Literature of Europe," after indulging in some profound reflections on "the thoughts of Pascal," and the theological dogmas of his school respecting the fallen nature of Man, thus speaks of Man's place in the creation—"It might be wandering from the proper subject of these volumes if we were to pause, ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... since the revival of learning. At an early period they had studied the masterpieces of ancient genius. In the present day they seldom bestow much attention on the dead languages; but they are familiar with the tongue of Pascal and Moliere, with the tongue of Dante and Tasso, with the tongue of Goethe and Schiller; nor is there any purer or more graceful English than that which accomplished women now speak and write. But, during the latter part of the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... state: President Lt. Gen. Idriss DEBY (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 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... our little fox-terrier there was a tie of deep affection. As indicative of the catholicity of his tastes I may mention that, going over his papers after his death, I discovered in the same drawer a manuscript appreciation of Wagner, "Football Hints," memoranda on "Pascal and Descartes on Method," and the outline of an essay on "The Norman ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... Christian's hope lightened the; mourner's desolation. But disgrace! Neither earth nor heaven held consolation for such wrong as his. Deschamps brooded on his woe; alone he endured his agony, giving utterance to his despair in the words: "France! Pascal! Traitor!" ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... [23]: Quoted 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
... systematically debased the standard of evangelical morality, for the purpose of increasing their own influence; and the charge was enforced in a manner which at once arrested the attention of the whole world: for the chief accuser was Blaise Pascal. His intellectual powers were such as have rarely been bestowed on any of the children of men; and the vehemence of the zeal which animated him was but too well proved by the cruel penances and vigils under which his macerated frame sank into an early grave. His spirit was the spirit ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... would call a considerable degree of obscurity. But obscurity is the appearance which to a first glance may be presented either by profundity or carelessness of thought. To some, obscurity itself is attractive, from the hope that worthiness is the cause of it. To apply a test similar to that by which Pascal tries the Koran and the Scriptures: what is the character of those portions, the meaning of which is plain? Are they wise or foolish? If the former, the presumption is that the obscurity of other parts ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... 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 no less than ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... all this, her reading at this epoch was without any order or method. She read everything voraciously, mixing all the philosophers up together. She read Locke, Condillac, Montesquieu, Bossuet, Pascal, Montaigne, but she kept Rousseau apart from the others. She devoured the books of the moralists and poets, La Bruyere, Pope, Milton, Dante, Virgil, Shakespeare. All this reading was too much for her and excited her brain. She had reserved Chateaubriand's Rene, and, on ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... closes the reading of his account of the Messiah with a profound impression that the author had a true conception of the divinity and authority of the Founder of Christianity. We cannot doubt his sympathy with those words of Pascal which he quoted frequently with exquisite pleasure: "En Jesus Christ toutes ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... absolute perfection—and love of one's neighbour, that is to say, love of all men without distinction, have been preached by all the sages of the world—Krishna, Buddha, Lao-tse, Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and among the moderns, Rousseau, Pascal, Kant, Emerson, Channing, and many others. Religious and moral truth is everywhere and always the same. I have no predilection whatever for Christianity. If I have been particularly interested in the doctrine of Jesus it ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... foreign phrases, and Spanish jargon, introduced by foreigners, so that a poor writer has plenty of elbow room in this Babelish language, which has since been taken in hand by Messieurs de Balzac, Blaise Pascal, Furetiere, Menage, St. Evremonde, de Malherbe, and others, who first cleaned out the French language, sent foreign words to the rightabout, and gave the right of citizenship to legitimate words used and known by everyone, but of which the Sieur ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... do with the money, 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 phrase seems ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... world. Into that next and awful world we strive to pursue men, and send after them our impotent party verdicts of condemnation or acquittal. We set up our paltry little rods to measure Heaven immeasurable, as if, in comparison to that, Newton's mind or Pascal's or Shakspeare's was any loftier than mine; as if the ray which travels from the sun would reach me sooner than the man who blacks my boots. Measured by that altitude, the tallest and the smallest among us are so alike diminutive ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... had escaped from New Caledonia some months before. A disagreeable cartoon was devised for his discomfort and he received a number of such delicate attentions as that following, which in the issue of July 15th greeted him on his arrival in England along with his distinguished compatriot, M. Pascal Grousset: ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... John Hatton who wrote "Duke St." He was earlier by nearly a century than John Liphot Hatton of Liverpool (born in 1809), who wrote the opera of "Pascal Bruno," the cantata of "Robin Hood" and the sacred drama of "Hezekiah." The biographical index of the Evangelical Hymnal says of John Hatton, the author of "Duke St.": "John, of Warrington; afterwards of St. Helens, then resident in Duke St. in ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... 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
... choosing" with the Abbe d'Aigrigny,—an amusement, moreover, which was 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 ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... Investigator Strait became Detroit de Lacepede; and his Backstairs Passage, Detroit de Colbert. To-day the Terre Napoleon charts look like a partial index to the Pantheon and Pere Lachaise. Laplace, Buffon, Volney, Maupertuis, Montaigne, Lannes, Pascal, Talleyrand, Berthier, Lafayette, Descartes, Racine, Moliere, Bernadotte, Lafontein, Condillac, Bossuet, Colbert, Rabelais, D'Alembert, Sully, Bayard, Fenelon, Voltaire,* (* Voltaire's name is on the Terre Napoleon sectional ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... 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 of ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... individual occupies a certain position, possesses a certain fortune, or bears certain titles, endows him with prestige, however slight his own personal worth. A soldier in uniform, a judge in his robes, always enjoys prestige. Pascal has very properly noted the necessity for judges of robes and wigs. Without them they would be stripped of half their authority. The most unbending socialist is always somewhat impressed by the sight of a prince or a marquis; ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... Old Fr. puy, a stage, eminence, Lat. podium, which survives in Puy de Dome, the mountain in Auvergne on which Pascal made his experiments with the barometer. Dupuy is a common family name in France, but the Depews of the West Indies have ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... these New Yorkers will get ahead of us." The Bishop left the meeting to attend a lecture on chemistry by Dr. Wells, of Baltimore. Mr. Grice introduced the subject of the convention; and a committee consisting of Bishop Allen, Benjamin Pascal, Cyrus Black, James Cornish and Junius C. Morel, were appointed to lay the matter before the colored people of Philadelphia. This committee, led, doubtless, by Bishop Allen, at once issued a call for a convention of the colored men of the United ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... indignation." He was a proud individualist. That he had a tender side, a talent for friendship, may be noted in the affectionate intercourse he maintained for years with Corot, Millet, Rousseau, Dupre, Geoffroy, the sculptor Pascal, and others. He was very impulsive and had a good heart with all his misanthropy, for he was an idealist reversed. The etching of him by Loys Delteil is thus described by a sympathetic commentator: "Daumier was very broad-shouldered, his head rather big, with slightly sunken eyes, which must, however, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... nominalism and found that it ended in materialism. They attempted a compromise in conceptualism which begged the whole question. Then they lay down, exhausted. In the seventeenth century—the same violent struggle broke out again, and wrung from Pascal the famous outcry of despair in which the French language rose, perhaps for the last time, to the grand style of the twelfth century. To the twelfth century it belongs; to the century of faith and simplicity; not to the mathematical certainties ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... When Pascal became warm in his celebrated controversy, he applied himself with incredible labour to the composition of his "Provincial Letters." He was frequently twenty days occupied on a single letter. He recommenced some above seven and eight times, and by this means obtained that perfection which ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... 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 of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... aware the purists 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
... but God may communicate to those glorious spirits, his immediate attendants, any of his perfections; in what proportions he pleases, as far as created finite beings can be capable? It is reported of that prodigy of parts, Monsieur Pascal, that till the decay of his health had impaired his memory, he forgot nothing of what he had done, read, or thought, in any part of his rational age. This is a privilege so little known to most men, that it seems almost incredible to those who, ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... Jesuits. The same thing may be seen in the narrower fields of literature. The Renaissance {27} on the whole takes a much more ethical note in England than, for instance, in France. A little later indeed, in the France of Pascal and Bossuet, books of devotion and theology were very widely read, as may be seen in the letters of Madame de Sevigne; but they can never have had anything like the circulation which they had in England, both in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Every one who looks at an English country-house ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... men's abstract ideas penetrate the temperament, touch the animal spirits, affect conduct. It was what they did with Bruno. The ghastly spectacle of the endless material universe, infinite dust, in truth, starry as it may look to our terrestrial eyes—that prospect from which Pascal's faithful soul recoiled so painfully—induced in Bruno only the delightful consciousness of an ever-widening kinship [241] and sympathy, since every one of those infinite worlds must have its sympathetic inhabitants. ...
— Giordano Bruno • Walter Horatio Pater
... to Boswell's visit to Corsica in 1766. The book he wrote was his "Journal of a Tour to Corsica, with Memoirs of Pascal Paoli."] ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... hour. It was no longer the lucky coup at the lansquenet table, the last comedy of Moliere, or the new opera of Lully about which they gossiped, but it was on the evils of Jansenism, on the expulsion of Arnauld from the Sorbonne, on the insolence of Pascal, or on the comparative merits of two such popular preachers as Bourdaloue and Massilon. So, under a radiant ceiling and over a many-coloured floor, surrounded by immortal paintings, set thickly in gold and ornament, there moved these nobles and ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... en 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, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... very handsome fellow, and I remembered quite well having seen him somewhere; but did not remember where. I was happy indeed to find any one who knew me and could vouch for me, and told him so. He smiled. "I venture to present myself to you, Madame. I am Pascal Grousset. Can I be of any service ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... of their situations, and, in order more fully to be prepared for future exigencies, and to extend the system of benevolence still further to those who should remove to Upper Canada, a circular was issued by five individuals, viz.:—the Rev. Richard Allen, Cyrus Black, Junius C. Morel, Benjamin Pascal, and James C. Cornish, in behalf of the citizens of Philadelphia, calling a convention of the colored delegates from the several States, to meet on the 20th day of September, 1830, to devise plans and means for the establishment of a colony ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... importance, a book deliberately used for the development of a 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 with some of the less remembered books, to pull ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... deliverance from Egypt. Placed on three covered matzos, within easy reach of the master, were a shank bone, an egg, some horseradish, salt water, and a mush made of nuts and wine. These were symbols, the shank bone being a memorial of the pascal lamb, and the egg of the other sacrifices brought during the festival in ancient times, while the horseradish and the salt water represented the bitter work that the Sons of Israel had to do for Pharaoh, and the mush the lime and mortar ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... the memorandum with a less solemn note. On Good Friday, 1779, he and Boswell went to church together. When they returned the good old doctor sat down to read the Bible, and he says, "I gave Boswell Les Pensees de Pascal, that he might not interrupt me." Of this very copy Boswell says: "I preserve the book with reverence." I wonder who has ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... state: President Denis 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 to be held ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... AND WITHOUT FEAR; TELL THAT WHICH THOU KNOWEST! The work of our race is to build the temple of science, and this science includes man and Nature. Now, truth reveals itself to all; to-day to Newton and Pascal, tomorrow to the herdsman in the valley and the journeyman in the shop. Each one contributes his stone to the edifice; and, his task accomplished, disappears. Eternity precedes us, eternity follows us: between two ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... and nodding and ducking to attract attention, as gipsies make up to truant boys, holding out tales for the nursery, and pretty pictures, and gilt gingerbread, and physic concealed in jam, and sugar-plums for good children. Who can but feel shame when the religion of Ximenes, Borromeo, and Pascal, is so overlaid? Who can but feel sorrow, when its devout and earnest defenders so mistake its genius and its capabilities? We Englishmen like manliness, openness, consistency, truth. Rome will never gain on us, till she learns these virtues, and uses them; ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... humor, which must have vent in the ludicrous. Occasionally an adversary or adverse dogma is demolished with excellent logic, and then comes a dismal grin or chuckle at the feat, which hardly reminds us of the sly, shy smile of Addison, or the frolic intelligence which laughs in the victorious eyes of Pascal. Still, with all abatements, "The Greyson Letters" make a book well worthy of being read, contain much admirable matter and suggestive thought, and might be allowed to pass muster among good books of the second class, did they not come before us with professions that seemed to invite the tests ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... in such law-giving, an exquisite sense of the pathos of human life and its requirements; scapulars, indulgences and sacraments are needed by the weak and the ageing, sacraments especially. "They make you believe but they stupefy you;" these words are Pascal's, the great light of the ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... offending decorum in various ways, offended it most of all exactly in that article of taste, as distinguished from morals, which, with first-rate French authors in general, is so capital a point of regard. On the other hand, Pascal,—not to mention the moralists by profession, such as Nicole, and the preachers Bourdaloue and Massillon,—Pascal, quivering himself, like a soul unclad, with sense of responsibility to God, constantly probes you, reading him, to the inmost quick of your conscience. Rousseau, notably in the "Confessions," ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... stars drew light. To ridicule the bad 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 least tincture of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... not likely to forget that. I got twenty-five muskets and cutlasses. Luckily they kept them at Pascal Aikey's, for the use of steam yachts going out to the east; and they had ammunition too, so I got fifty rounds for each musket. It is not likely that we shall want to use that much, but it is best to be ...
— The Queen's Cup • G. A. Henty
... asks for a book that her father can read aloud to the family. And similar instances could be multiplied; they are always to be obtained where loving Christian hearts are interested in children, and when they remember that fine saying of Jacqueline Pascal; "Parler a Dieu des petites ames plus qu' aux petites ames ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... 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 scaffold of Sidney. But who shall estimate her influence on private happiness? Who shall say how many thousands have been made wiser, happier, and better by those pursuits ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... 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 at the top of the town; and the fort and the jetty are still at ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... 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 ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... Besides this, he created his son Pepin, king of Italy, whose dominion extended to Benevento; all the rest being possessed by the Greek emperor, with whom Charles was in league. About this time Pascal I. occupied the pontificate, and the priests of the churches of Rome, from being near to the pope, and attending the elections of the pontiff, began to dignify their own power with a title, by calling themselves cardinals, and arrogated so great authority, that having excluded the people ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... author but yourself so frequently break the thread (seldom a strong thread) of his plot to converse with his reader and moralise his tale, we also might be offended. But who that loves Montaigne and Pascal, who that likes the wise trifling of the one and can bear with the melancholy of the other, but prefers your ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... the speculation which for some time was rife concerning its authorship made many turn to it who would never have looked at it otherwise. One of the most gushing weeklies had a fit over it, and declared it to be the finest thing that had been done since the "Provincial Letters" of Pascal. Once a month or so that weekly always found some picture which was the finest that had been done since the old masters, or some satire that was the finest that had appeared since Swift or some something which was incomparably the finest that had appeared since ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... rest in this crown of beatitudes. It is the tear-drop crystallized into the diamond, the blood-drop transfigured into the ruby of heaven's eternal crown. It is the joy of suffering with Jesus, and then forgetting all the sorrow in the overflowing joy, until with the heavenly Pascal we know not which to say first, and so we say them both together, "Tears upon ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... concerning its own origin, but it is also a prophecy concerning its destiny. The more thoroughly it is studied the more convincing becomes the evidence that it must some time reach its perfected state. The perfection of intelligence, love, and will require endless growth. The great words of Pascal can hardly be recalled ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... and fatalistic about this, but the power of such a tone as a protection against outward shocks is manifest. Pascal is another Frenchman of pessimistic {281} natural temperament. He expresses still more amply the ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... World are in analogy with the Phenomena of the Natural World requires no restatement. Since Plato enunciated his doctrine of the Cave or of the twice-divided line; since Christ spake in parables; since Plotinus wrote of the world as an image; since the mysticism of Swedenborg; since Bacon and Pascal; since "Sartor Resartus" and "In Memoriam," it has been all but a commonplace with thinkers that "the invisible things of God from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made." ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... Mithridate, le Tartuffe, l'Ecole des Femmes, Phedre, Andromaque, le 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 ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... as that of Messrs. Pilar and Sons; Pascal Brothers; H. Herman, and a few others, have 3000 such frames at work during the season; as they are filled, they are piled one over the other, the flowers are changed so long as the plants continue to bloom, which now and then exceeds ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... exercise my taste or judgment, and more than once I have been led by a novel into a deep and instructive train of thinking. But I cannot forbear to mention three particular books, since they may have remotely contributed to form the historian of the Roman empire. 1. From the Provincial Letters of Pascal, which almost every year I have perused with new pleasure, I learned to manage the weapon of grave and temperate irony, even on subjects of ecclesiastical solemnity. 2. The Life of Julian, by the Abbe de la Bleterie, first introduced me to the man and the times; and I ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... 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 Mueller (1786), Charles Babbage (1822). (v.) Analytical machines; ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Friendship in Literature. School-girl Friendships. Friendships in Conventual Life. Jeanne Philippon and Angelique Boufflers. Agnes Arnauld and Jacqueline Pascal. Madame de Longueville and Angelique Arnauld. Friendships between Queens and their Maids of Honor. Sakoontali and Anastiya. Marie de Medicis and Eleanora Galigaei. Queen Philippa and Philippa Picard. Lady Jane Beaufort and Catherine Douglas. Mary Stuart and her Four Marys. ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... very "eighteenth century" in his suspicion of enthusiasm, and I always found him amusingly impervious to ideas of a visionary or mystical order. It was impossible that so intelligent and omnivorous a reader as he should not be drawn to the pathetic figure of Pascal, but he was puzzled by him. He described him as "manifestly a man full of contrasts, difficult to understand, and as many-sided as Odysseus." On another occasion, losing patience with Pascal, he called him "a half-lunatic man of genius." Fenelon annoyed him still more; the spiritual ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... by High Churchmen as an originator of the Oxford Movement, and he impressed all his contemporaries by the brilliancy of his gifts. Dean Church went so far as to compare him with Pascal. But his ideas of bringing up children were naturally crude, and his treatment of Anthony was more harsh than wise. His early character as seen at home is described by his mother in a letter written a year before her death, when he was seventeen. Fond as she was ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... holding of the breath against a powerful contraction of the expiratory muscles. He points out that this action occurs in accordance with the law of the distribution of pressure in a fluid body, commonly known as Pascal's ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... at you like a veteran of the lost cause of intellect, to whose soul the trumpet of defeat strikes with as mournful and vehement a music as to that of Pascal himself, but who thinks that a wise man may be permitted to hearten himself up in evil days with an anecdote after the manner of his ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... address himself to the perusal of his great tragedians, Corneille and Racine—or of his great comedians, Moliere and Regnard—or if his great poets, Boileau and La Fontaine—or of his great wits, La Rochfaucauld and La Bruyere—or of his great philosophers, Des Cartes and Pascal—or of his great divines, Bossuet and Arnauld—or of his great scholars, Mabillon and Montfaucon—or if his great preachers, Bourdaloue and Masillon—and not confess that no other monarch was ever surrounded by an assemblage of men of genius so admirable for the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... first at the house of P. Marsenne, then at that of Montmort, a member of the Council of State, afterwards at that of Melchisedec Thevenot, the learned traveller. It included Descartes, Gassendi, Blaise and Etienne Pascal. Hobbes, the author of Leviathan, was presented to it during his visit to Paris in 1640. Colbert conceived the idea of giving an official status to this learned club. A number of chemists, physicians, anatomists and eminent mathematicians, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... pensee of Pascal's to the effect that a fop carries on his person the evidence of the existence of so many people devoted to his service. This thought may be delightful to a fop; but it is not pleasant to a mind sensitive to beauty and hating the bare thought of ugliness: for while vanity takes ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... with a quotation from Arnauld, the friend of Pascal, and the intrepid antagonist of the Vatican and the Grand Monarque; one of the noblest, freest, most untiring and honest intellects, our world has ever seen. "Why don't you rest sometimes?" said his friend Nicole to him. "Rest! why should I rest here? haven't I an ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... were utterly ignorant of meteorology. They are readily carried away by the influence of the last new writers, even when they are not first-rate, but they take absolutely no interest in classics such as Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, or Pascal, and this inability to distinguish the great from the small betrays their ignorance of practical life more than anything. All difficult questions that have more or less a social character (for instance the migration question) they settle by studying ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... 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 ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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
... offender was told that sin consisted in wilfulness, and wilfulness in the perfect knowledge of the nature of sin, according to which doctrine blindness and passion were sufficient exculpations. They invented the doctrine of mental reservation, on which Pascal was so severe. Perjury was allowable, if the perjured were inwardly determined not to swear. A man might fight a duel, if in danger of being stigmatized as a coward; he might betray his friend, if he could thus ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... Shakespeare, Dante, Emerson, Wordsworth, Browning, Christina Rossetti, Newman's "Dream of Gerontius" and "Apologia," Thomas a Kempis, several works on mystics and mysticism, a life of St. Catherine of Genoa, another of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Ignatius Loyola's "Spiritual Exercises," Pascal's "Letters," etc., etc. Over the windows ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... said, 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 et de notre conscience, ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... Pascal, one of the greatest geniuses and best men that ever lived, entertained a notion that God made men miserable here in order to their being happy hereafter; and in consequence of this notion, he imposed upon himself the most painful ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... you. No need to argue—your face tells me that. But we'll have the time of our life before they gather us in. Anyhow, we'll want to go back. The whole world is crazy, but ashamed to acknowledge it. We are not. Pascal said men are so mad that he who would not be is a madman of a new kind. To escape ineffable dulness is the privilege of the lunatic; the lunatic, who is the true aristocrat of nature—the unique man in a tower ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... without allowing themselves to be led astray by its absurdity, which is palpable to them; and thereby they participate in the kernel of the matter so far as they are able. I may add as an explanation that the use of mystery has been attempted even in philosophy; for example, when Pascal, who was pietest, mathematician, and philosopher in one, says in this threefold character: God is everywhere centre and nowhere periphery. Malebranche has also truly remarked, La liberte est un mystere. One might go further, and maintain that ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... the universal prayer for long life, which is the verdict of Nature, and justified by all history. We have, it is true, examples of an accelerated pace, by which young men achieved grand works; as in the Macedonian Alexander, in Raffaelle, Shakspeare, Pascal, Burns, and Byron; but these are rare exceptions. Nature, in the main, vindicates her law. Skill to do comes of doing; knowledge comes by eyes always open, and working hands; and there is no knowledge ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... as of February 1996, more than 80 political parties were officially recognized; the following are represented in the National Assembly: Alliance of the National Party for Democracy and Development (PNDD) and the Democratic Renewal Party (PRD), Pascal Chabi KAO; Action for Renewal and Development (FARD-ALAFIA), Mathieu KEREKOU; Alliance of the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the National Union for Solidarity and Progress (UNSP), Bruno AMOUSSOU; Alliance Chameleon; ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... lack of goodly company, When masters of the ancient lyre Obey my call, and trace for me Their words of mingled tears and fire! I talk with Bacon, grave and wise, I read the world with Pascal's eyes; And priest and sage, with solemn brows austere, And poets, garland-bound, the Lords of Thought, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... head of this party stood the General Pascal Paoli, whom the revolution had recalled to his native isle from his exile of twenty years, and who objected that Corsica should bend obediently under the blood-stained hand of the French Convention, and whose wish it was that the isle should be an ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... 1549. As I left the village, I met Claude Perrin and the cure Pascal, and took leave of them. I went towards Beauvais, end I passed through Orleans, Bourges, Limoges, Bordeaux, and Toulouse. If you want the names of people whom I saw and to whom I spoke, you can have them. What ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... picture of a tall, spare man, handsome, courteous, obliging, but subtle, deceitful, dangerous, capable of nursing the blackest thoughts and of sanctioning the worst actions for the advancement of his cause. The Lettres Provinciales of Pascal first stamped on public opinion the idea that the Jesuit was necessarily immoral and venomous; the implacable hatred of Michelet and Symonds has brought them as criminals before the bar of history. On the other hand they have had ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... the tenets of any faith, Christian or other. There were sceptical defenders of fixity and religious upholders of evolution. However, in Christian countries, from the time of the Reformation onwards, a change in this neutrality of religion to theories of the living world took place. As Pascal prophesied, Protestantism rejected the idea of an infallible Church in favour of the idea of an infallible book, and, because it happened that this book included an early legend of the origin of the world in a form apparently incompatible with evolution, Protestantism and, to a lesser and secondary ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... of these national heroes was also the last—Pascal Paoli. Fitted for his task by birth, by capacity, by superior training, this youth was in 1755 made captain-general of the island, a virtual dictator in his twenty-ninth year. His success was as remarkable as his measures were wise. Elections ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... the central dogmas of logic, metaphysics and physics, from which start the subsequent inquiries of Locke, Leibnitz and Newton. They are also the direct antitheses to the scepticism of Montaigne and Pascal, to the materialism of Gassendi and Hobbes, and to the superstitious anthropomorphism which defaced the reawakening sciences of nature. Descartes laid down the lines on which modern philosophy and science were to build. But himself ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... as they did in constant and free interchange of thought on questions of philosophy and literature and art; delighting, each of them, in the epigrammatic terseness which is the charm of the 'Pensees' of Pascal, and the 'Caracteres' of La Bruyere—agreed to utter themselves in this form, and the book appeared, anonymously, in two ...
— MacMillan & Co.'s General Catalogue of Works in the Departments of History, Biography, Travels, and Belles Lettres, December, 1869 • Unknown
... to their advantage—from agricultural labourers, who in order to increase a small patrimony, assiduously strive, day and night, to cultivate their fields, drive their ploughs, and urge on their oxen. Now, Pascal suggests that men only endeavour to work hard at their business and sciences with the view of escaping those questions of greatest import which every moment of loneliness or leisure presses upon them—the questions relating to the wherefore, the whence, and the whither of life. Curiously ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... of her faith, but it produced quite the reverse effect, detaching her from it for ever. After reading and enjoying Chateaubriand's book she set to work on the philosophers and essayists Mably, Locke, Condillac, Montesquieu, Bacon, Bossuet, Aristotle, Leibnitz, Pascal, Montaigne, and then turned to the poets and moralists La Bruyere, Pope, Milton, Dante, Virgil, Shakespeare, &c. But she was not a metaphysician; the tendencies of her mind did not impel her to seek for scientific solutions of the great mysteries. ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... all; unequally bestowed it gives rise to those incongruities to whom the name of Genius is given, and which, if we only could see them, would look like deformities. The same law governs the body; perfect beauty is generally allied with coldness or silliness. Though Pascal was both a great mathematician and a great writer, though Beaumarchais was a good man of business, and Zamet a profound courtier, these rare exceptions prove the general principle of the specialization of ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... Aristotle, Albertus Magnus, Plotinus, Marcus Aurelius, Pascal, Socrates, Plato, Aspasia, and others, all of whom had glimpsed, if not fully attained, cosmic consciousness, we come to a consideration of those cases in our own day and age, in which this superior consciousness has ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... and defended themselves perfectly; but at the same time they carried the war into the enemy's camp, especially by the ingenious "Provincial Letters" of the famous Pascal. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... problem of KNOWLEDGE AND CONSCIENCE has hitherto had in the souls of homines religiosi, a person would perhaps himself have to possess as profound, as bruised, as immense an experience as the intellectual conscience of Pascal; and then he would still require that wide-spread heaven of clear, wicked spirituality, which, from above, would be able to oversee, arrange, and effectively formulize this mass of dangerous and painful experiences.—But who could do me this ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Maciot de Bethencourt. Consult Bergeron, Histoire de la premiere decouverte et conquete des iles Canaries; Pascal d'Avezac, Notice des decouvertes ... dans l'ocean Atlantique, etc., Paris, 1845; Viera y Clavigo, Historia general de las islas de Canaria, 1773; also the works of Major, Barker-Webb, Sabin Berthelot, and ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... in you is unshaken. Hamlet's dilemma does not apply to you, for YOU ARE and cannot help being. Even your mad injustice towards yourself in calling yourself a "miserable musician and blunderer" (!!) is a sign of your greatness. In the same sense Pascal says, "La vraie eloquence se moque de l' eloquence." It is true that your greatness brings you little comfort and happiness, but where is happiness, in the narrow monotonous sense which is absurdly ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... breath urge them, that Byron perished at Missolonghi, and that Mazet died at Barcelona; it is the tribune under the feet of Mirabeau, and a crater under the feet of Robespierre; its books, its theatre, its art, its science, its literature, its philosophy, are the manuals of the human race; it has Pascal, Regnier, Corneille, Descartes, Jean-Jacques: Voltaire for all moments, Moliere for all centuries; it makes its language to be talked by the universal mouth, and that language becomes the word; it constructs in all minds the idea of progress, the ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... during the reign of Constantine, on the site of a temple erected by the sixty nations of Gaul in honour of Csar Augustus. The first church having been destroyed by the Saracens, in the 8th cent., it was rebuilt in 1070, and consecrated in 1106 by Pope PascalII. Since then it has been frequently repaired and altered. The style belongs to what is called modern Greek, introduced into France under Charlemagne. The cupola of the chancel rests on circular pendentive arches springing from four granite columns which stood formerly in the temple of ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... life. This period was the moment of suffocation before the storm. If Tchekoff were alive to-day, now that the tempest has burst forth, his sadness would be lessened, or it would at least have before it the screen which, according to Pascal, people wear before their eyes that they may not see the abyss, on the edge of which they pass their lives. Up to the present time, the Russians ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... immediately to be turned into everybody, eternity, instead of greeting him with an individual kiss, wrapping him in a monistic embrace. The broad drift of human conviction leads to the first conclusion, a persistent personality. The greatest philosophers, from Plato to Pascal, deny the second view, a blotting extinction of the soul, declaring it false in science and incredible in presentation. The third theory a pantheistic absorption the irresistible common sense of mankind repudiates ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... is infamous; that authorized Marseillaise, a sacrilege. Men are ferocious and conceited brutes; we are in the HALF AS MUCH of Pascal; when will come ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... included in a short aphorism, a shrug, and the word "voila," truths expressed in condensed sentences must always have a peculiar charm. It is, perhaps, from this love of epigram, that we find so many eminent French writers of maxims. Pascal, De Retz, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere, Montesquieu, and Vauvenargues, each contributed to the rich stock of French epigrams. No other country can show such a list of brilliant writers—in England certainly we ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... very last thing desired by Henry's enemies, and there began a most unscrupulous attack which ended only with his death. Pope Urban's successor, Pascal II, strengthened by the death of the anti-Pope Clement and the failure of his party to maintain a successor, renewed the excommunication against Henry, and did everything deliberately to stir up strife in ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... in this position. It was characteristic of decadent scholasticism, it squared with Luther's exaggerations about the impotence of reason in fallen man, and Pascal had given his own highly personal twist to it. Bayle has been hailed as a forerunner of Voltairean scepticism. It would be truer to say that a Voltairean sceptic could read Bayle's discussions in his own sense and for his own purposes ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... a shadow round about him. Shall not the day of the Lord be darkness and not light? even very dark, and no brightness in it? He did not believe that. What miserable scruples to torment, blind, and pollute the soul! Pascal has written that there are thousands who sin without regret, who sin with gladness, who feel no warning and no interior desire not to sin. They doubted, hated, loved, acted, felt, and thought just as they pleased. Perhaps they were not happy, but ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... passed through, as how it has lived each on the way, with what depth of conviction and force of sincerity. For a modern young man to thus experience all round, and pass, and continue beyond where such great ones as St. Bernard, Pascal, and Swedenborg, have anchored their starry souls to shine thence upon men for all time, is no uncommon thing. It is more the rule than the exception: but one would hardly say that in going further they have gone higher, or ended greater. The footpath of pioneer individualism must inevitably become ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... 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 of generation, the mysteries of ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... hazard, insurances, 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, Quetelet, and Professor ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... a skeleton. 3. Pascal, after a heavy blow, saw a fiery abyss into which he was afraid he would fall. 4. A man who had seen an enormous fire, for a long time afterward saw flames continually. 5. Numerous cases in which criminals, especially ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... as unmitigated prosperity. It would be apt to produce a morbid and ghastly piety; the 'bright lamps' of which Taylor speaks would still be irradiating only a tomb." (Edinburgh Review No 141 The article on Pascal) We may doubt whether there is more essential religiousness in this seeking of sorrow as a mortification,—in this monastic self-laceration and exclusion,—than in the morbid misery of the hypochondriac. Neither comprehends the ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin |
