Pascal's Pensées

'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.'

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.