"Pascal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... controversy as to whether uncial or cursive is the older form of writing); yet now, within fifty years of Colenso's heresy, there is not a Churchman of any authority living, or an educated layman, who could without ridicule declare that Moses wrote the Pentateuch as Pascal wrote his Thoughts or D'Aubigny his History of the Reformation, or that St. Jerome wrote the passage about the three witnesses in the Vulgate, or that there are less than three different accounts of the creation jumbled together in the book of Genesis. Now the maddest Progressive will hardly ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... the spectacle. Without any objective change whatever, variety had taken the place of monotonousness. His host and his host's household, his men and his maids, as they became intimately known to Clare, began to differentiate themselves as in a chemical process. The thought of Pascal's was brought home to him: "A mesure qu'on a plus d'esprit, on trouve qu'il y a plus d'hommes originaux. Les gens du commun ne trouvent pas de difference entre les hommes." The typical and unvarying Hodge ceased to exist. He had ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... should do, when done. Mrs. Edwards has found me a good Photo of 'nos pauvres Rochers,' a straggling old Chateau, with (I suppose) the Chapel which her old 'Bien Bon' Uncle built in 1671—while she was talking to her Gardener Pilois and reading Montaigne, Moliere, Pascal, or Cleopatra, among the trees she had planted. Bless her! I should like to have made Lamb like her, in spite of ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... persuaded her grandmother not to work on Sundays. Another 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 ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... accomplishment is incompatible with true religion; for has not the Church intellects as many-sided and as high as Augustine and Chrysostom, Dante and Calderon, Descartes and Da Vinci, De Vega and Cervantes, Bossuet and Pascal, Saint Bernard and Gregory the Seventh, Aquinas and Michael Angelo, Mozart and Fenelon? Ah! I behold the youthful throng, happier than we, who here, in their own sweet country,—in this city of government and of law with its wide streets, its open spaces, its air of freedom and of light,—undisturbed ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... Pascal and others in ancient and modern times[51] had compared in casual and unfruitful remarks the history of the race to the history of the individual, but Turgot was able in some sort to see the full meaning and extent of the analogy, as well as the limitations proper to it, and to draw from it ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... enthusiasm, who can seriously 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 International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... the Maxims of Pascal that to govern is to foresee. This is not only true of politics and affairs of government, but applies as well to trade relations. It is that country which foresees the situation commercially in Russia that will reap the enormous benefits ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... incorrigible twist in Mr Arnold's French estimates, of some inability to admire the right things, even when he did admire I cannot agree with them. Joubert, of course, has his own shortcomings as a pensee-writer. He is rococo beside La Bruyere, dilettante beside La Rochefoucauld, shallow beside Pascal. There is at times, even if you take him by himself, and without comparison, something thin and amateurish and conventional about him. But this is by no means always or very often the case; and his merits, very great in themselves, were even greater for ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... simple are not alone subject to illusions of fancy. The great and learned Pascal, than whom France has produced no more worthy philosopher, believed that an awful chasm yawned by his side, into which he was in danger of being thrown. This dreadful vision, with other fancies as gloomy, cast a shadow over an eventful period of his life, and gave a dark coloring to certain ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... those who opposed his inclinations. No poet but is moved with indignation at the recollection of the tutor at the Port Royal thrice burning the romance which RACINE at length got by heart; no geometrician but bitterly inveighs against the father of PASCAL for not suffering him to study Euclid, which he at length understood without studying. The father of PETRARCH cast to the flames the poetical library of his son, amidst the shrieks, the groans, and the tears of the youth. Yet this burnt-offering neither ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... 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 is caused not by opacity, but profundity. But some will object, notwithstanding, ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... to Thee! Alleluia! Thine own might hath set Thee free. Alleluia! Come, for primal joy restored, Alleluia! Let us bless our Pascal Lord! Alleluia! ...
— The St. Gregory Hymnal and Catholic Choir Book • Various
... 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 century recognized its possibilities, ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... 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, ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... their heart-deep convictions as to the vital 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 work of the ministry ...
— The Vaudois of Piedmont - A Visit to their Valleys • John Napper Worsfold
... obedience, not in a mob of poor illiterate monks, but in men chosen for their capacity and trained to the exercise of their highest faculties? Yet there have never lacked such men to serve the Order; and as one of our enemies has said—our noblest enemy, the great Pascal—'je crois volontiers aux histoires dont ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... works most frequently recommended are Thomas a Kempis' Imitation of Christ, Pascal's Pensees, Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Butler's Analogy of Religion, Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Dying, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and last, not ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... of noble thoughts, that may well take its place by the side of the celebrated thoughts of Pascal, which have in them more of metaphysics, but less that touches the human heart. It makes a ...
— Hymns, Songs, and Fables, for Young People • Eliza Lee Follen
... some such hazard as this, in thought or even in practice—that it might be, though refining, or tonic even, in the case of those strong and in health, yet, as Pascal says of the kindly and temperate wisdom of Montaigne, "pernicious for those who have any natural tendency to impiety or vice," the line of reflection traced out above, was fairly chargeable.—Not, however, with "hedonism" and its supposed consequences. The blood, the heart, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... reached its height during Tchekoff's 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 have ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... regarded 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 ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation. The most lamentable example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed that his intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas it was ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... Aristophanes, Shakspeare, Cervantes, Moliere, Swift, Fielding, Lamb, Richter, Carlyle: widely as these writers differ from each other in style and genius, the least skilled reader would hardly need to be told that the list which includes them all is a catalogue of humourists. And Cicero, Lucian, Pascal, Voltaire, Congreve, Pope, Sheridan, Courier, Sydney Smith—this, I suppose, would be recognized at once as an enumeration of wits. Some of these humourists, like Fielding, like Richter, like Carlyle, are always, or almost ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... mathematical talent is no cause why he should or should not be devout. His gifts to weigh and measure the stars are purely intellectual; and nature being seldom profuse upon one individual,—as she was upon Pascal and Newton,—the presumption as to an astronomer, of whom we know nothing, would be that what may be termed his emotive appreciation of stars and stellar systems is probably not so full as his intellectual. And no amount ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... Pascal was born in June, 1623, is perfectly well established and uncontested.[482] That he wrote his conic sections at the age of sixteen might be difficult to establish, though tolerably well attested, if it were not for {221} one circumstance, for the book was not ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... Madame Pascal's school in Paris was the one you are in search of," he answered soothingly, "she would seem to be in the hands of people who can afford to take care of her. They adopted her because she had been the favorite companion of their little daughter who died. They had no other children, ...
— A Little Princess • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... 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, even shortly, to inquire whether, while the creation of a world so full of evil ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... 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 ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... Celeste in a whisper to the candid mathematician, "Couldn't you be, like Pascal and Bossuet, learned and ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... books (issued at sixpence each and upwards). I mentioned in my last chapter Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. Certain even more widely known works will occur at once to the memory. I may also mention Pascal, La Bruyere, and Emerson. For myself, you do not catch me travelling without my Marcus Aurelius. Yes, books are valuable. But not reading of books will take the place of a daily, candid, honest examination of ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... 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
... 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 a ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... pamphlet in the form of a letter appeared on the bookstalls of Paris; and with its appearance the long reign of confused ideals and misguided efforts came to an end for ever. The pamphlet was the first of Pascal's Lettres Provinciales—the work which ushered into being the great classical age—the Grand Siecle of ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... in describing a certain type of mind: "Il est d'heureux esprits, des ames fortes et saines, que n'effraie point le silence eternel des espaces infinis ou s'aneantissait la raison de Pascal. Naives et robustes natures, males et vigoureux penseurs, qui gardent toute la vie quelque chose des dons charmants de la jeunesse et de l'enfance meme, une foi vive dans le temoinage immediat de nos sens et de notre conscience, une humeur alerte, ...
— Baron d'Holbach • Max Pearson Cushing
... and passionate pieces to be found in the whole literature of the eighteenth century, his poem on the great earthquake of Lisbon (November 1755). No such word had been heard in Europe since the terrible images in which Pascal had figured the doom of man. It was the reaction of one who had begun life by refuting Pascal with doctrines of cheerfulness drawn from the optimism of Pope and Leibnitz, who had done Pope's Essay on Man (1732-34) into French verse as late as 1751,[334] and whose imagination, ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... just conceptions of the constitution of that system and of its past history. With relation to this universe, man is, in extent, little more than a mathematical point; in duration but a fleeting shadow; he is a mere reed shaken in the winds of force. But as Pascal long ago remarked, although a mere reed, he is a thinking reed; and in virtue of that wonderful capacity of thought, he has the power of framing for himself a symbolic conception of the universe, which, although doubtless ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... 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 Plato ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... report as I do at the close, First, the preacher speaks through his nose: Second, his gesture is too emphatic: Thirdly, to waive what's pedagogic, The subject-matter itself lacks logic: Fourthly, the English is ungrammatic. Great news! the preacher is found no Pascal, Whom, if I pleased, I might to the task call Of making square to a finite eye The circle of infinity, And find so all-but-just-succeeding! Great news! the sermon proves no reading Where bee-like ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... Tellier and D'Aguesseau and Mole! What great prelates and preachers were Bossuet, Fenelon, Bourdaloue, Massillon, Flechier, Saurin,—unrivalled for eloquence in any age! What original and profound thinkers were Pascal, Descartes, Helvetius, Malebranche, Nicole, and Quesnel! Until the seventeenth century, what more respectable historians had arisen than Dupin, Tillemont, Mabillon, and Fleury; or critics and scholars than Bayle, Arnauld, De Sacy, and Calmet! La Rochefoucauld uttered maxims which were learned ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... 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
... generations of Christians before them. When the boastful innovators offer me a new system of belief (which is really a congeries of unbeliefs) I say to them: "the old is better." Twenty centuries of experience shared by such intellects as Augustine, Luther, Pascal, Calvin, Newton, Chalmers, Edwards, Wesley and Spurgeon are not to be shaken by the assaults of men, who often contradict each other while contradicting God's truth. We have tested a supernaturally inspired Bible for ourselves. As my eloquent and much loved friend, Dr. McLaren, of Manchester ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... whatever to a place in the Literature of Power, a literature which many of us think the only thing in the world of books worth consideration. Great philosophy is here, and high thought. Who would for a moment wish to disparage St. Bonaventure, the Seraphic Doctor, or Aquinas the Angelic? Plato and Pascal, Malebranche and Fenelon, Bossuet and Machiavelli are all among the world's immortals. Yet now and again we are bewildered by finding the least important book of a well-known author—as for example ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... hundred years.[268] In France the vindices flammae survived to the last; St. Louis had handed over these sacrilegious offenders to the Church to be burned; in 1750 two pederasts were burned in the Place de Greve, and only a few years before the Revolution a Capuchin monk named Pascal ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... 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 ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... books smuggled into France; and he thenceforth assumed a tone bolder and marked by positive disbelief. In 1746 he wrote his Pensees Philosophiques, intended to be placed in opposition to the Pensees of Pascal. Pascal, by a series of sceptical propositions, had hoped to establish the necessity of revelation. Diderot tried by the same method to show that this revelation must be untrue.(549) The first portion of the propositions(550) bore upon philosophy and natural religion, but at length he came ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... considered, may 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 ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... Flinders was styled Presqu'Ile Cambaceres; his 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 chart, but it seems to have been crowded out of the large ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... great men of science—general scholars, inventors, philanthropists. The deepest Christian life, the most noble Christian character has not availed to shield combatants. Christians like Isaac Newton and Pascal, and John Locke and John Howard, have had these weapons hurled against them. Nay, in these very times we have seen a noted champion hurl these weapons against John Milton, and with it another missile which often appears on these battle-fields—the epithets of 'blasphemer' ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... 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
... the 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 ...
— 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
... de 1635 qu'on voit paraitre la devise que Montaigne avait adoptee, le que sais-je? avec l'embleme des balances. ... Ce que sais-je que Pascal a si severement analyse se lit au chapitre douze du livre ii; il caracterise parfaitement la philosophie de Montaigne; il est la consequence de cette maxime qu'il avait inscrite en grec sur les solives de sa librairie: 'Il n'est point de raisonnement au quel on n'oppose ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... 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
... their 'morale' read Pascal's 'Lettres Provinciales', in which it is very truly displayed ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... 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 ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... 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 murderers, always had their victims ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... to-morrow. However, to humour the up-to-date notion, the Baron recommends to his young friends who wish to amuse their elders, Dolldom, a dolls' opera, by CLIFTON BINGHAM, set to music by FLORIAN PASCAL. Some of the songs are exquisite. It would make a very funny play, children imitating dolls. Published ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, November 15, 1890 • Various
... the company which consisted of a dozen or so of their friends, but the only person who attracted my attention was a very young man, whom I set down at once as in love with Agatha. His name was Don Pascal Latilla; and I could well believe that he would be successful in love, for he was intelligent, handsome, and well-mannered. We became friends in the course of ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... add, a most entertaining variety of justice. Judges, who were elected by a "blue" or republican majority, and who were anxious for re-election, would always deliver judgment in favour of the blues. The same thing would happen in the "white" or royalists districts. "Justice has her epochs," Pascal said ironically, and in this case justice would have her districts. It would not be the same in the Alpes-Maritimes as in the Cotes-du-Nord. The Court of Appeal, if it attempted to be impartial, would spend its time sending cases back ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... 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 ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... admiration, even from the unwilling, and the philosopher who stands aloof from the world and is without real strength finds himself admiring a crude, bustling fellow ordering men about. True, we admire such acknowledged great intelligences as Plato, Galileo, Newton, Pascal, Darwin, etc., but in reality only a fragment of the men and women of any country know anything at all about these men, and the admiration of most is an acceptance of the authority of others as to what it is proper to admire. Genuine admiration is in ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... feels he cannot receive and entreat as brothers; in other words, we may say that this feeling is not the result of ratiocination but of forces that are deeper and more elemental than reason; that it is a hardening of heart rather than a mental conviction, in which sense we may apply the words of Pascal "Le caeur a ses raisons que la raison ne ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... sentimental form, from which most thinkers recoil. It is all about "self," yet it never leaves an egotistical or affected impression. It is a curious combination of skepticism and religious feeling, like Pascal, but its elements are compounded in different proportions and the range of thought is far wider and more comprehensive. On the other hand, Pascal is more forcible, and looks down upon human things from a higher point ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... civilized Europe, the fountain from whence other 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... 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 have ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... Frenchman, who was a baby to him. Lamb would have cracked a score of jokes at Nicole, worth his whole book of sentences; pelted his head with pearls. Nicole would not have understood him, but Rochefou-cault would, and Pascal too; and some of our old Englishmen would have understood him still better. He would have been worthy of hearing Shakespeare read one of his scenes to him, hot from the brain. Commonplace found a great comforter in him, as long as it was good-natured; it was to the ill-natured ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... 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
... of the child the seed of sorrow, "in the green tree an ambushed flame, in Phosphor a vaunt-guard of Night." Yet never of him could be written that thrilling saying which Sainte-Beuve uttered of Pascal, "That lost traveller who yearns for home, who, strayed without a guide in a dark forest, takes many times the wrong road, goes, returns upon his steps, is discouraged, sits down at a crossing of the roads, utters cries to ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... clothed them in garments of tragic dignity. Unless you cut deep into life, wantonness and gaiety lose their savour and are not fit for the ends of art. The French spirit is not only embodied in Rabelais and Montaigne and Moliere—if these are your superficial men!—but also in Pascal. Was there so great a gulf between Pascal and Daumier? And I find not only the spirit of Pascal in some of these pictures in Le Rire, but sometimes even his very phrases used as the ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... 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
... memorable for the commencement of the 'Guesses at Truth.' He and his Oxford brother, living 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 volumes, ...
— MacMillan & Co.'s General Catalogue of Works in the Departments of History, Biography, Travels, and Belles Lettres, December, 1869 • Unknown
... 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 to those ideas. Languages are like the sea, they move to and fro incessantly. At certain times they leave ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... narrations of the French defeats of 1870 had been extracted from La Debacle of Zola. Neither Montaigne, nor La Rochefoucauld, nor La Bruyere, nor Diderot, nor Stendhal, nor Balzac, nor Flaubert appeared. On the other hand, Pascal, who did not appear in the other book, found a place in this as a curiosity; and Christophe learned by the way that the convulsionary "was one of the fathers of Port-Royal, a girls' school, near Paris..." [Footnote: The anthologies of French literature which Jean-Christophe ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... which 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 Old ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... modern movement against the political spirit An objection considered Importance to character of rationalised conviction, and of ideals The absence of them attenuates conduct Illustrations in modern politics Modern latitudinarianism Illustration in two supreme issues Pascal's remarks upon a state of Doubt Dr. Newman on the same Three ways of dealing with the issues Another illustration of intellectual improbity The Savoyard Vicar Mischievousness of ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... ease which came to the Children of Israel upon their 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 from which ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... environment better than any other ever written. Previous to this, Boswell had spent some time on the Continent, and, driven by the peculiar form of hero-worship which was his overmastering impulse, he visited Corsica and became intimate with Pascal Paoli, the patriot who freed the island from the Genoese, but was subsequently conquered by the French, In 1768 Boswell published 'An Account of Corsica, Memoirs of Pascal Paoli, and a Journal of a Tour to ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... of a beggar. In the story of "Christ's Brother"[436] a young man—whose father, on his deathbed, had charged him not to forget the poor—goes to church on Easter Day, having provided himself with red eggs to give to the beggars with whom he should exchange the Pascal greeting. After exhausting his stock of presents, he finds that there remains one beggar of miserable appearance to whom he has nothing to offer, so he takes him home to dinner. After the meal the beggar exchanges crosses with his host,[437] giving ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... founded by St. Badulph 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 South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... distinguished—and, even then, not 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 ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... 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
... always, or often, that 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. Scruples of conscience, if he felt such, might well be pushed ...
— Giordano Bruno • Walter Horatio Pater
... London, in the flat, green meadows of Essex. The Pascals had children the same age as Felix and Hilda; and when they engaged a tutor for their own boys and girls they proposed to Felicita that her children should join them. In Mr. Pascal's quiet country parsonage were to be met some of the clearest and deepest thinkers of the day, who escaped from the conventionalities of London society to the simple and pleasant freedom they found there. Mr. Pascal himself was a leading spirit ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... 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
... being 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
... 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 ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... onward movement. A Savant may out-lustre a Savant, a Poet never throws a Poet into the shade. Hippocrates is outrun, Archimides, Paracelsus, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, La Place, Pindar not; Pheidias not. Pascal, the Savant, is out-run, Pascal, the Writer, not. There is movement in art, but not progress. The Frescoes of the Sistine Chapel are absolutely nothing to the Metopes of the Parthenon. Retrace your steps as much as you like ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... the purists will appeal to Bosseux, to Fenelon, Raceri, Boilleau, Pascal, and others of the reign of Louis XIV. I ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... 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 ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... 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 ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... why? In the first place probably because I'm not a Pascal after all, et puis... secondly, we Russians never can say anything in our own language.... We never have said ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... that there are many kinds of brains and only one kind of no brains, their diversity of gifts is remarkable, but one characteristic they have in common: they are all poets. Their efforts in the way of eulogium illustrate and illuminate Pascal's obscure saying that poetry is a particular sadness. If not sad themselves, they are at least the cause of sadness in others, for no sooner do they take to their legs to remind us that life is fleeting, and to make us glad that it is, than they burst into bloom as poets all! Some one ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... 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
... the answer! Life has a different meaning, a different riddle, a different reply for each of us. There is not one sphinx, but many sphinxes—as many as there are women and men. We must all answer for ourselves. Pascal has one answer, "Believe!" Moliere has another, "Observe!" Thackeray's answer is, "Be good and enjoy!" but a melancholy enjoyment was his. ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... seems to have made a good Edition of Pascal's Letters: I should have thought they had been quite well enough edited before; and yet a more 'exhaustive' Edition is to follow the House that Jack built, ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... of science." And he looked with deep interest upon the countenance of the secretary, which did in truth show signs of that thoughtfulness and sagacity, though not of the morbid suffering, which is associated in all minds with the image of the author of the Provinciales. Monsieur Pascal returned the gaze which was fixed upon him with one in which intense curiosity was mingled with doubt, if not fear. His countenance immediately, however, relaxed into an expression of pleased surprise. During this brief moment, these two men, so unlike—the elderly, toil-worn ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... 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 ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... purpose: he co-ordinated them, not into a scientific theory, but into a work of art. His method was one which, to be successful, demanded a self-confidence, an imagination, and a technical power, possessed by only the very greatest artists. Everyone knows Pascal's overwhelming sentence:—'Le silence eternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie.' It is overwhelming, obviously and immediately; it, so to speak, knocks one down. Browne's ultimate object was to create some such tremendous effect as that, by no knock-down ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... 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 to do ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... Fabricius, and two students at Wittemberg, who were good calculators, requesting them to reside with him at Benach, as his assistants and pupils: He at the same time dispatched his destined son-in-law, Tengnagel, accompanied by Pascal Muleus, to bring home his wife and daughters from Wandesberg, and his instruments from Huen; and he begged that Longomontanus would accompany them to Denmark, and return in the same ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... no further." Nothing is more notorious than the gorgeous individualism and personality of those flamboyant monsters whom we call the Elizabethans, unless it be the absence of that quality in the great French writers of the next age. Had Pascal been as bold as Newton he might have been as big. No one will deny that Descartes was a finer intelligence than Hobbes, or that his meticulous respect for French susceptibilities gave an altogether improbable turn to his speculations. ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... Jesuits introduced in this logomachy with the Jansenists papal bulls, royal edicts, and a regiment of dragoons! The Jansenists, in despair, appealed to miracles and prodigies, which they got up for public representation; but, above all, to their Pascal, whose immortal satire the Jesuits really felt was at once "sufficient and efficacious," though the dragoons, in settling a "confusion of words," did not boast of inferior success to Pascal's. Former ages had, indeed, witnessed even a more melancholy logomachy, in the Homoousion ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... heard to murmur that in his loftiest moments the promise and potency of matter give no response to the deepest cry of the soul. And along the centuries stand the princes of thought, Paul, Augustine, Bacon, Luther, Milton, Pascal, Kepler, Newton, Coleridge, Faraday, Herschel, testifying to the impregnability of the intellectual foundation of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... torment of doubt, in abdicating the functions of reason and 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 more glorious ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... as it too often is, and as it ought to be if the truth of my "truisms" were widely accepted, is so startling that in my desire to account for it I have had recourse to a paradox. "Trop de verite," says Pascal, "nous etonne: les premiers principes ont trop d'evidence pour nous." I have suggested that the inability of so many teachers to live up to the spirit, or even to the letter, of my primary "truism," may be due to its having ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... identified him with the defence of their cause? The reputation of sour austerity and of argumentative and tiresome prolixity which attaches to the remembrance of all the writers of Port-Royal, save Pascal—has that affected too the work of Augustin, enlisted in spite of himself in the ranks of these pious schismatics? And yet, if there have ever been any beings who do not resemble Augustin, and whom probably he would have attacked with all his eloquence and all the force of his dialectic, ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... the [Greek: mousichae] which he justly regarded as an all-sufficient education for the soul! Alas for him and for it!—since both were most desperately needed, when both were most entirely forgotten or despised [1]. Pascal, a philosopher whom we both love, has said, how truly!—"Que tout notre raisonnement se reduit a ceder au sentiment;" and it is not impossible that the sentiment of the natural, had time permitted it, would have regained its old ascendency over the harsh mathematical reason of the ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... more 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
... {{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 ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... were to come the "Petition of Right," the national anthem of 1628, the "Grand Remonstrance," and "Paradise Lost." With it, Blake and Pascal should voyage heroically in diverse seas. In its influence Jeremy Taylor should write his "Liberty of Prophesying," Sir Matthew Hale his fearless replies, while Rembrandt was placing on canvas little Dutch children, with wooden shoes, crowding ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... only in the mind of one who neither fears nor hopes"; or Gellert: "He who loves one vice, loves all the vices"? Can we believe Chamfort: "Ambition more easily takes hold of small souls than great ones, just as a fire catches the straw roof of the huts more easily than the palaces"; or Pascal: "In a great soul, everything is great"; or the poet Bodenstedt when he sings: "A gray eye is a sly eye, a brown eye is roguish and capricious, but a blue eye shows loyalty"? And too often we must be satisfied with ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... Swiss words, 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 ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... Antichrist shall have power to perform prodigies capable of shaking the faith even of the elect? In this case, by what signs shall we know whether God means to instruct or ensnare us? How shall we distinguish whether the wonders, we behold, come from God or devil? To remove our perplexity, Pascal gravely tells us, that it is necessary to judge the doctrine by the miracles, and the miracles by the doctrine; that the doctrine proves the miracles, and the miracles the doctrine. If there exist a vicious and ridiculous ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... 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 ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... 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. ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... of state: 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 term; if no candidate receives at least 50% of the total vote, the two candidates receiving ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... 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 ...
— How to Study • George Fillmore Swain
... distinction. The souls once consigned to hell were never supposed to be redeemable by any price. There is on record only one instance of a damned soul that was saved, and that by the special intercession of the Virgin. See Pascal's Provincial Letters. An indulgence saved the person who purchased it from ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... 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, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... as 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, and here alone, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... our being, that at length the conscience of mankind rose suddenly in revolt against it, and consigned to one common ruin the system and its doctors. The blow, long pending, was finally struck in the Provincial Letters of Pascal, and since the appearance of those memorable Papers, no moralist of the smallest influence or credit has ever avowedly conducted his speculations in the footsteps of the Casuists. The whole field of ethical science was thus left at the ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... the moments until time to change for dinner. Accordingly I watched the tables. Once, like most men of my age, I had been bitten by the roulette fever and had wrestled with "systems" in their thousands, not so much for the mere "gamble," as for the joy of striving to beat the wily Pascal at his ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... that grows on every bush. Of course, in religious more than in any other matters, there is a perpetual contradiction between our thoughts and our deeds which is inevitable to our social order, and is bound to lead to cette tromperie mutuelle of which Pascal speaks. But I have often wondered, while admiring the splendid portrait of Tartuffe, whether such a monster ever, or at least often, has walked the stage of life; whether Moliere observed, or only ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... night on which Jonathan's arrival had plunged the party assembled at Zebedee Pascal's into such dismay a week had passed by—seven days and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... drop suspended in the infinite empyrean. His aspiration had thus reached "one of the highest arcs that human contemplation circling upwards can make from the glassy sea whereon she stands" (Doctr. and Disc.), Like his contemporary Pascal, his mind had beaten her wings against the prison walls ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... doubt about that," I said, as he laid the book upon the table. "I want to try this thing once more. Here is Pascal; if you can find any reference to the 'Serpent of the Nile' in that, you needn't go any farther, I shall be satisfied," and I passed the book to him. He turned the pages over in silence for half a minute, or so, and then said: "I guess this counts as a failure,—no, ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... we in the nineteenth century hold to be irrational or savoring of quackery, was either a madman or a charlatan, all criticism is nullified. The school of Alexandria was a noble school, but, nevertheless, it gave itself up to the practices of an extravagant theurgy. Socrates and Pascal were not exempt from hallucinations. Facts ought to explain themselves by proportionate causes. The weaknesses of the human mind only engender weakness; great things have always great causes in the nature of man, although they are often developed ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... Holy Land, as if there were more merit in contending with the infidels, in a remote region, for a barren sepulchre, than at home for the dearest interests of man—for honor, patriotism, and religion. Fortunately for Spain, Pope Pascal II, in answer to the representations of Alfonso, declared that the proper post of every Spaniard was at home, and there were his true enemies. Soon afterward Yussef returned to Morocco, where he died on the 3d day of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various |
