Pascal's Pensées

About this book

'Man is only a reed, the weakest thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.' These are the notes Blaise Pascal left for a great defence of Christianity that he never finished: fragments on the misery and greatness of human beings, on our endless need for distraction, on the limits of reason, and the famous wager, which argues that a sensible person should bet on God's existence because there is everything to gain and little to lose. 'The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.'

Context and significance

Pascal (1623–1662) was a mathematical genius who built one of the first calculating machines as a young man, studied the vacuum and helped found probability theory, before a mystical experience in 1654 turned him wholly to religion. He died at thirty-nine, and the fragments were published in 1670. Readers of any belief find his aphorisms startlingly modern.

About the author