Book · 14 chapters · 7 hr 57 min read
Pensées
Translated by W. F. Trotter
Blaise Pascal · 1623–1662
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Thoughts on Mind and on Style
About this book
When Blaise Pascal died in 1662 at the age of thirty-nine, he left behind hundreds of notes for a great defence of the Christian faith that he never finished. His friends at Port-Royal published them in 1670 as the Pensées, or “Thoughts.” Pascal begins not with proofs from nature but with man himself: his greatness and his misery, his restlessness, the diversions he uses to hide from the one question that matters. Here are the thinking reed, the famous wager, “the heart has its reasons, which reason does not know,” and the “Mystery of Jesus,” written as if kneeling beside Christ in Gethsemane.
The difference between the mathematical and the intuitive mind.—In the one the principles are palpable, but removed from ordinary use; so that for want of habit it is difficult to turn one's mind in that direction: but if one turns it thither ever so little, one sees the principles fully, and one must have a quite inaccurate mind who reasons wrongly from principles so plain…
Contents
- 1 Thoughts on Mind and on Style 22 min
- 2 The Misery of Man Without God 71 min
- 3 Of the Necessity of the Wager 37 min
- 4 Of the Means of Belief 19 min
- 5 Justice and the Reason of Effects 21 min
- 6 The Philosophers 25 min
- 7 Morality and Doctrine 71 min
- 8 The Fundamentals of the Christian Religion 20 min
- 9 Perpetuity 32 min
- 10 Typology 29 min
- 11 The Prophecies 48 min
- 12 Proofs of Jesus Christ 26 min
- 13 The Miracles 32 min
- 14 Polemical Fragments 25 min
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