"Pascal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... refers 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
... 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 Library and beg as a special favour permission ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... this war 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 MORE ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... because it would not be so liquorish. The best color, and its natural one, is the amber. By force of whipping, it is made white, but loses flavor. There are but two or three pieces a year of red Muscat made; there being but one vineyard of the red grape, which belongs to a baker called Pascal. This sells in bottles at thirty sous, the bottle included. Rondelle, negociant en vin, Porte St. Bernard, fauxbourg St. Germain, Paris, buys three hundred pieces of the first quality every year. The coteaux yield ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... age the hearts of others of precocious sensibilities. The love experience of Lord Byron, Victor Hugo, and Canova the sculptor, when they too were only children is a matter of history. This statement we shall the more readily accept if we recall the dictum of Pascal: "The passions are great in proportion as the intelligence is great. In a great soul everything is great." In the light of that principle we must say that if Dante's love attachment in early life runs counter to the experience of mankind, he is, even as a boy, exceptional in the power of imagination ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... Eternity to rest in?" The whole of the Arnauld family were the most extraordinary instance of that hereditary character, which is continued through certain families: here it was a sublime, and, perhaps, singular union of learning with religion. The Arnaulds, Sacy, Pascal, Tillemont, with other illustrious names, to whom literary Europe will owe perpetual obligations, combined the life of the monastery with that ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... . I grant you,—my comrades then Were called Old Pascal Dubois' Men Half-breeds all of us . . . I, a scamp, The best long-shot in the Touchwood Camp; Muscle and nerve like strings of steel, Sound in the game of bit and heel— There's your guide-book. . . . But, Jeanne ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... —Pascal, if I remember rightly, would not suffer his mother to kiss him as he feared the contact of ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... faced the windows, Dr. Pascal was looking for a paper that he had come in search of. With doors wide open, this immense press of carved oak, adorned with strong and handsome mountings of metal, dating from the last century, ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... 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 tincture ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... 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 ...
— MacMillan & Co.'s General Catalogue of Works in the Departments of History, Biography, Travels, and Belles Lettres, December, 1869 • Unknown
... there is a tendency towards Atheism; but, assuredly, no such tendency exists in the highest and most scientific minds of modern Europe. The faith of Bacon, Newton, and Boyle, of Descartes, Leibnitz, and Pascal, in regard to the first principles of Theology, is still the prevailing creed of the Sedgwicks, the Whewells, the Herschells, and the Brewsters ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... 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
... course, he was betrayed by the bewildering and defiant puzzle of life: seeing in the face 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 which no one responds, resumes his march with frenzy and pain, throws ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... 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
... library dozing chiefly, and Dorothea in her boudoir, where she was wont to occupy herself with some of her favorite books. There was a little heap of them on the table in the bow-window—of various sorts, from Herodotus, which she was learning to read with Mr. Casaubon, to her old companion Pascal, and Keble's "Christian Year." But to-day opened one after another, and could read none of them. Everything seemed dreary: the portents before the birth of Cyrus—Jewish antiquities—oh dear!—devout epigrams—the sacred chime of favorite hymns—all alike were as flat as tunes ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... practical of the Christian Fathers. By and by came Priestley and Price, and Dr. John Taylor, and W. E. Channing, and a host of others of the modern school of heterodox writers. I also read a number of celebrated French authors, including Bossuet and Bourdaloue, Flechier and Massillon, Pascal and Fenelon, and the eloquent, Protestant preacher and author, M. Saurin. I read the principal works both of Catholics and Protestants, of the Fathers and Reformers, of Churchmen and Dissenters, of Quakers and Mystics, ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... he did all that was really holy, virtuous, and respectable; but who could blame him for wishing to denounce hypocrisy? As for his supposed skepticism, and his expressions of despair, they may be classed with the misgivings of Job, of Pascal, of Lamartine, of Chateaubriand, and of other great minds, for whom the unknown world is a source of constant anxiety of thought, and whose cry of despair is rather a supplication to the Almighty that He would reveal himself more to their eyes. It must be borne in mind ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... investigator, an historian, or a moralist so far from being required to present the graces of a wit, an essayist, a pamphleteer, or a novelist, would be warned off such ground by the necessity of expressing himself sincerely. Pascal, Biot, Buffon, or Laplace are examples of the clearness and beauty with which ideas may be presented wearing all the graces of fine literature, and losing none of the severity of science. Bacon, also, having an opulent and active intellect, spontaneously expressed himself in forms of various ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... Italian, German, and 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 the Sieur ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... of M. Aurelius, "When thou wishest to give thyself delight, think of the excellences of those who live with thee; for instance, of the energy of one, the modesty of another, the liberal kindness of a third." Again, according to this distinction of the word, we are to give the name of aphorism to Pascal's saying that "Most of the mischief in the world would never happen, if men would only be content to sit still in their parlours."[1] But we should give the name of maxim to the profound and admirably humane counsel of a philosopher of a very different school, that "If you would love mankind, ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... TRUTH-SEEKER. [6] My mission is written in these words of the law: SPEAK WITHOUT HATRED 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 infinites, of what account is one poor mortal that the century ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... 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 you arrive, before ...
— How to Study • George Fillmore Swain
... in every age, have been the triumphs of Athens. Wherever a few great minds have made a stand 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 in which she has taught ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... this suffering at our own hands goes on till at last the tables are completely turned against self-love, and till what was once to us the dearest thing in the whole world becomes, as Pascal says, the most hateful. We begin life by hating the men, and the things, who hurt us. We hate the men who oppose us and hinder us; the men who speak, and write, and act, and go in any way against us. We bitterly hate all who ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... an Armenian of the name of Pascal, set up a coffee-house, but meeting with little encouragement, left Paris and came ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 2, November 10 1849 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... faces and serious talk were the fashion of the 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 ladies of France, all ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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 aside for ...
— Giordano Bruno • Walter Horatio Pater
... materials from the meeting-house period of American history. But the direct literature of that period has passed almost wholly into oblivion. Jonathan Edwards had one of the finest minds of his century; no European standard of comparison is too high for him; he belongs with Pascal, with Augustine, if you like, with Dante. But his great treatises written in the Stockbridge woods are known only to a few technical students of philosophy. One terrible sermon, preached at Enfield in 1741, is still ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... the 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
... and 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 ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... always the risk that her native shrewdness might wake up some day from the long torpor induced by the homage paid to her rank, and discover the humiliating fact that she was not always imposing. By good luck for Miss Fairfax's favor with her, Pascal's maxim recurred to her memory—that though it is not necessary to respect grand people it is necessary to bow to them—and her temptation to be merry at Lady Angleby's expense was instantly controlled. Miss Burleigh could not but make ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... minutes how much can be done! The weightiest questions of warfare, politics, morality, can be discussed, even decided, in twenty-six minutes. Twenty-six minutes well spent are infinitely more valuable than twenty-six lifetimes wasted! A few seconds even, employed by a Pascal, or a Newton, or a Barbican, or any ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... 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
... revolutionary theory and such an important discovery were, of course, not to be accepted without controversy, but the feeble arguments of the opponents showed how untenable the old theory had become. In 1648 Pascal suggested that if the theory of the pressure of air upon the mercury was correct, it could be demonstrated by ascending a mountain with the mercury tube. As the air was known to get progressively lighter from base to ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... 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
... in modern times come into ever-increasing use, not merely for dealing 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... remarkable enough. Such is the cycloid, first conceived by Galileo, and a stumbling-block and cause of contention among geometers long after he had left it, together with his system of the universe, undetermined. Descartes, Roberval, Pascal, became successively challengers or challenged respecting some new property of this curve. Thereupon followed the epicycloids, curves which—as the cycloid is generated by a point upon the circumference of a circle rolled along a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... imagination the 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 ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... forced them to withdraw their troops and leave the Genoese once more face to face with the islanders. Promptly these rose again. Giafferi and Hyacinth Paoli had fled to Naples; Hyacinth with two sons, Pascal and Clement, whom he trained there (as I am told) in all the liberal arts and in undying hatred of the Genoese. These two lads, returning to the island, took up their father's fight and have maintained ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... Pascal says that an inch added to the length of Cleopatra's nose would have changed the fortunes of the world. But having said this, he has said nothing, for all the forces of nature and all the power of dynasties could not have added an inch to ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... 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 ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... Still, without being a Pascal, Balzac in the first half of his teens, was evidently not an ordinary child. There was a ferment of thought, as he said, reacting on itself and seeking to surprise the secrets of its own being. Fostered ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... bad guess. A little after the time when the famous Pascal papers[18] were produced, I came into possession of a correspondence which, but for these papers, I should have held too incredible to be put before the world. But when one sheep leaps the ditch, another will follow: so I gave the following ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... 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
... 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, ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... the other is that man is a scion of a progressive simian stock. Naturalists have exposed the pit whence man has been digged and the rock whence he has been hewn, but it is surely a heartening encouragement to know that it is an ascent, not a descent, that we have behind us. There is wisdom in Pascal's maxim: ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... salt, the symbol at once of communion and friendship, of durability and incorruption, and of sincerity of mind, and which was commanded to be presented with every offering—the emblem of an enduring covenant:[414] the pascal lamb, which represented Christ slain, the blood of which was sprinkled, as his blood was, for defence from wrath, and the flesh of which was eaten, so as to afford a vigour symbolizing that of those who, having eaten of his flesh, like the hosts of Israel from Egypt, go forth from bondage to liberty ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... rarely express, because they must take a 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 ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... probabilities, which comprises not only the chances of games of 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, ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... infinite sphere. Its center everywhere, its circumference, nowhere." This comes from Pascal, from his Penses. ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James
... his lecture on Emerson that Matthew Arnold asked: "Who are the great men of letters?"—meaning thereby the masters of prose. "They are men like Cicero, Plato, Bacon, Pascal, Swift, Voltaire—writers with, in the first place, a genius and instinct for style, writers whose prose is by a kind of native necessity true and sound." The British critic added that: "It is a curious thing, that quality of style, which marks the great writer, the born man ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... 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 ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... 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 amidst a crowd of littlenesses ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... is often a sceptic on the surface and a believer underneath. Pascal has called Montaigne 'un pur pyrrhonien'; but Pascal himself has been accused of scepticism. Living in an age when the crimes daily committed in the name of religion might so easily have inspired a hater of violence like Montaigne with a horror of creeds, ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... aspect in 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 been disintegrated into a number of varied fellow-creatures—beings ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... one things, whereby we hope to escape the need of concentrated attention. We have become fussy and fidgety. We are divided into committees and sub-committees. In place of clearness of thought we have a confusion of tongues. Our case illustrates the truth which Pascal enunciated, that most of the evils in the world can be traced to the inability of a person to sit in his ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... invasion of Canaan. We are told that the passage of the Jordan took place on the tenth day of the first month; and that the Feast of the Passover was held on the fourteenth day of that month. These are the only two positive dates given us. The week of the Pascal celebrations would have occupied the time until the moon's last quarter. Then preparations were made for the siege of Jericho, and another week passed in the daily processions round the city before the moment came for its destruction, which must have ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... 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 ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... find 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 position, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... perfume; and the 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" ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it is all heavy, dull; there are risks, canals. Oh, canals! you have no idea how canals occupy us; it is easy to explain. Government needs canals. Canals are a want especially felt in the departments; they concern commerce, you know. 'Rivers,' said Pascal, 'are walking markets.' We must have markets. Markets depend on embankments, tremendous earth-works; earth-works employ the laboring-classes; hence loans, which find their way back, in the end, to the pockets of the poor. Voltaire said, 'Canaux, canards, canaille!' But the government ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... Grenville saw the resemblance to Swift, and Lord Holland kindly reminded the anonymous satirist that "the only author to whom he could be compared in English, lost a bishopric for his wittiest performance." In later years Lord Murray[58] said, "After Pascal's Letters, it is the most instructive piece of wisdom in the form of Irony ever written." Macaulay declared that Sydney Smith was "universally admitted to have been a great reasoner, and the greatest master of ridicule that has appeared among us since Swift." Even ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... one of the best tools a minister can have. He should be read in the great literary and sermonic literature, the work of Bossuet, Massillon, Chrysostom, Augustine, Fenelon, Marcus Aurelius, mediaeval homilies, Epictetus, Pascal, Guyon, Amiel, Vinet, La Brunetiere, Phelps, Jeremy Taylor, Barrows, Fuller, Whitefield, Bushnell, Edwards, Bacon, Newman, Ruskin, Carlyle, Emerson, Davies, Law, Bunyan, Luther, Spalding, Robertson, Kingsley, Maurice, Chalmers, Guthrie, Stalker, Drummond, Maclaren, Channing, Beecher, ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... 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 ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... The infinite spaces, 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, they may be permitted ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... 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 in the evening know that the light, burning fast, ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... without art or arrangement,—a sort of diary, valuable solely for their precious thoughts; not lofty soarings in philosophical and religious contemplation, which tax the brain to comprehend, like the thoughts of Pascal, but plain maxims for the daily intercourse of life, showing great purity of character and extraordinary natural piety, blended with pithy moral wisdom and a strong sense of duty. "Men exist for each other: teach them or bear with them," ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... Dance at the Reception and Ball given by Max Pascal and Little Whity, at Tutonia Hall, Tuesday evening, ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... Pascal, one day, remarked that if Cleopatra's nose had been shorter the whole face of the world would probably have been changed. The same idea may be applied to the unforeseen advantages produced by accidents, some of which have ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... unquestioning 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
... 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 mortification. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... 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
... confined within just limits, ought to interest, in an equal degree, the mathematician, the experimentalist, and the statesman. From the time when Pascal and Fermat established its first principles, it has rendered and continues daily to render services of the most eminent kind. It is the calculus of probabilities, which, after having suggested the best arrangements ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... marching away to seiges of Milan, reducing strong rogues and deeply wronging the church (whose forged documents are all purely genuine). Then what a hubbub there is in the church! Monstrous anti-popes, one of whom, Victor, dies, and a satanic bishop Henry of Liege consecrates another, Pascal, and the dismal schism continues. Then our lord Alexander returns to Rome, and the Emperor slaughters the Romans and beseiges their city and enthrones Pascal. There are big imperial plans afoot, unions of East and West, which end in talk: ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... Empire," extending to a score of volumes, was doubtless suggested to M. Zola by Balzac's immortal "Comedie Humaine." He was twenty-eight years of age when this idea first occurred to him; he was fifty-three when he at last sent the manuscript of his concluding volume, "Dr. Pascal," to the press. He had spent five-and-twenty years in working out his scheme, persevering with it doggedly and stubbornly, whatever rebuffs he might encounter, whatever jeers and whatever insults might be directed against him by the ignorant, the ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... 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 sex, not the routine of ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... seats have been high, but their minds low, I swan. They have been breeders for ages, and known the two rudiments of the science; have crossed and crossed for grenadiers, racehorses, poultry, and prize-bullocks; and bred in and in for fools; but which of them has ever aspired to breed a Newton, a Pascal, a Shakespeare, a Solon, a Raphael? Yet all these were results to be obtained by the right crosses, as surely as a swift horse or a circular sow. Now fancy breeding shorthorns when you might breed long heads." So Vespasian was to engender ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... BLAISE PASCAL was born at Clermont-Ferrand in 1623. His father, a president of the Court of Aids at Clermont, a man of intellect and character, guided his education in languages, natural science, and mathematics. The boy's precocity was extraordinary; ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... when the Jansenists, in their inveterate obstinacy, 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 ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... The passage of Pascal occurs in the Fragment d'un traite du vide, not published till 1779 (now included in the Pensees, Premiere Partie, Art. I), and therefore without influence on the origination of the theory of progress. It has been pointed out that Guillaume ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... Pascal, Etudes sur, par M. Victor Cousin Pellico, Silvio, Lettres de Physiology, Animal and Vegetable, by Henry Goadby Poe's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... it better than he did his mother tongue.[85] He read Montesquieu 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 chapters in "The Decline and Fall" on Julian, one is interested to know that ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... Hawthorne, although there will of course always be wide differences of opinion on that point: Hesiod, Herodotus, Menander, Aristophases; Livy, Casar, Lucretius, Juvenal; Ariosto, Macchiavelli, Manzoni, Lope de Vega, Buthas Pato; Corneille, Pascal, Rousseau; Wieland, Klopstock, Heine, Auerbach; Spenser, Ben Jonson, Fletcher, Fielding, Pope, Scott, Wordsworth, Shelley, Carlyle, Browning, Tennyson, Froude; Webster, Emerson, Wasson. Sappho, Bion, Moschus, and Cleanthes were certainly poets of a high order, but only some fragments of their ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... for the pure contemplative spirit and majestic intuition of Plato! Alas for 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 ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... 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 lacked ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... seems to have been for him a real physical sensation, a bodily condition induced by the adventure of the spirit. This is not unusual in mystical states, and possibly the cryptic notes made by Pascal record a similar experience.[57] He continued in this warmth for nine months, when suddenly he felt and heard the "canor," the "spiritual music," the "invisible melody" of heaven. Here is his description of his change from "burning love" to ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... possession for some time, and soon 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
... 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 others have ...
— Frank Merriwell's Bravery • Burt L. Standish
... Pascal has so eloquently said, "it is in this abyss that the problem of our condition gathers its complications and intricacies, so that man is more inconceivable without this mystery than this mystery is inconceivable to man;" but the ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... drama. They envelop in a circle of invariable phenomena the apparent irregularity of combat, determining the critical point in the outcome of the battle. Whatever be the conditions, time or people, he gives a code of rules which will not perish. With the enthusiasm of Pascal, who should have been a soldier, Ardant du Picq has the preeminent gift of expressing the infinite in magic words. He unceasingly opens an abyss under the feet of the reader. The whole metaphysics of war is contained therein and is ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... 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 ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... 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, the greatest ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... list of the "provisionally exiled," on which figured Edward Quinet, Victor Chauffour, General Laidet, Pascal Duprat, Versigny, Antony Thouret, Thiers, Girardin, and Remusat. Four Representatives, Mathe, Greppo, Marc-Dufraisse, and Richardet, were added to the list of the "expelled." Representative Miot was reserved for the tortures of the casemates of Africa. Thus ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... ducs d'Orleans and Vendome were addicted to infamous debauchery; the Duc d'Antin was caught, flagrante delicto, in theft; drunkenness and gambling were prevalent at court, the Grand Prieur de Vendome boasted that he had not gone to bed sober one night in forty years. Pascal, discussing the privileges of the nobles and the kings, said to them boldly: "You are kings only of concupiscence." This great court, the most brilliant in Europe, "sweated hypocrisy," said Saint-Simon. It may be remarked, that, in addition to the very frequent disfigurement ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... was seeing 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 before their eyes. ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... 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 ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... man with more wit than his book. I saw nothing novel either in 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. His wife had a nobler soul than he, as she ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Pascal said that "the doubt of God implies belief in God." And similarly it may be said that a woman only parleys when she has surrendered. A day came when the Marquise admitted to herself that she was loved, and ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... wrote as well religious works in prose (Los nombres de Cristo, La perfecta casada), and in verse translated Virgil, Horace and other classical authors and parts of the Old Testament. In gentleness of character and in the purity in which he wrote his native tongue, he resembles the Frenchman Pascal. His poems are in vol. 37 of the Bibl. de Aut. Esp. Cf. Ticknor, Period II, Cap. IX, and Introduction, p. xxii. La vida retirada is written in imitation of ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... their 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 ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... Politics, and Biography; a fifth on Political Economy and History; and the remaining fifth on Science and Philosophy. One cannot help remarking, as an indication of the economist's tastes, the almost complete absence of works in theology and prose fiction. Hume's Dialogues on Natural Religion and Pascal's Pensees belong as much to philosophy as theology; Jeremy Taylor's Antiquitates Christianae, Father Paul Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent, and Ruchat's Histoire de la Reformation de la Suisse belong as much to history; and except these the only ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... the fatal day of their captivity. Some consisted of lamentations on the perfidy of false friends, denouncing their own folly, or women, or the judge who condemned them. Among a few were brief sketches of the victims' lives; still fewer embraced moral maxims. I found the following words of Pascal: "Let those who attack religion learn first what religion is. Could it boast of commanding a direct view of the Deity, without veil or mystery, it would be to attack that religion to say, 'that there is nothing seen in ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... charming than chastened, come thickly from the first; on the rosy flowery unguarded slopes, where trespasses ripen into errors full of equivocal effervescence, into too palpitating issues. The anecdote puts La Palferine's genius before you in all its vivacity and completeness. He realizes Pascal's entre-deux, he comprehends the whole scale between tenderness and pitilessness, and, like Epaminondas, he is equally great in extremes. And not merely so, his epigram stamps the epoch; the accoucheur ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... 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
... "The 'I,'" said Pascal, "is hateful." Speak as little of yourself as possible; for you must know that the reader's self-esteem is as great as yours. He will never forgive you for wanting to condemn him to have a good opinion of you. It is for your book to speak for you, if it comes to ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... 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; Alliance for Democracy and ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Epicurean quietude to the quietism of Fenelon, and this only speculatively, for his practical life remains the same, and all his anthropological discovery consists in returning to the theory of the three lives, lower, human, and higher, which is in Pascal and in Aristotle. And this is what they call a philosopher in France! Beside the great philosophers, how poor and narrow seems such an intellectual life! It is the journey of an ant, bounded by the limits of a field; of a mole, who spends his days in the construction of ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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 Rousseau's Poland ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... fortune. What he is going to 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 ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... 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 kept the ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... Spinoza (a) Substance, Attributes, and Modes (b) Anthropology; Cognition and the Passions (c) Practical Philosophy 3. Pascal, Malebranche, Bayle ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... and his floggings. Our scholars can scarcely be 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 ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... yourself, as much as you can, of the history, policy, and practice of that society, from the time of its founder, Ignatius of Loyola, who was himself a madman. If you would know their morality, you will find it fully and admirably stated in 'Les Lettres d'un Provincial', by the famous Monsieur Pascal; and it is a book very well worth your reading. Few people see what they see, or hear what they hear; that is, they see and hear so inattentively and superficially, that they are very little the better for what they do see ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... production. After being spoken, it was prepared for the "Journal of Commerce," with the greatest care I could give to it: most of it was written again and again. Unlike Pascal, who said, as to his longest and inferior sixteenth letter, that he had not had time to make it shorter, I had time; and I did condense in that one speech the matured reflections of my whole life. I am calmly satisfied ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... Sir John Herschel and Sir Wm. Thompson, among astronomers, have proclaimed its antagonism to the facts of physical astronomy. No new facts subversive of the foundations of faith in God as recognized in the universe by Bacon, Newton, Boyle, Descartes, Leibnitz, Pascal, Paley and Bell, have been discovered by such scientists as Whewell, Sedgwick, Brewster, Faraday, Hugh Miller, or our American geologists, Dawson, Hitchcock, and Dana. Nor have the deliberate and expanded demonstrations of its unscientific character ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... 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 on ...
— The Queen's Cup • G. A. Henty
... 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 ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... Butler and Aristotle and the rest of the time-worn sages, we are curiously conscious of the presence of a spirit of action, affairs, excitement. It is not the born scholar eager in search of knowledge for its own sake; there is little of Milton's 'quiet air of delightful studies;' and none of Pascal's 'labouring for truth with many a heavy sigh.' The end of it all is, as Aristotle said it should be, not knowing but doing:—honourable desire of success, satisfaction of the hopes of friends, a general ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... Nor can it be deemed incredible, that the mind of an unlettered soldier should have yielded to the weight of evidence, which, in a more enlightened age, has satisfied or subdued the reason of a Grotius, a Pascal, or a Locke. In the midst of the incessant labors of his great office, this soldier employed, or affected to employ, the hours of the night in the diligent study of the Scriptures, and the composition of theological discourses; ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... thought that it has been pushed by some modern writers to extravagant exaggeration. As you well know, there is another aspect of history, which, long before Carlyle, was enforced by some of the ablest and most independent intellects of Christendom. Pascal tells us that if Cleopatra's nose had been shorter, the whole face of the world might have been changed, and Voltaire is never tired of dwelling on the small springs on which the greatest events of history turn. Frederick the Great, who was probably the keenest ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... had excited to activity. The great critic replied with pamphlet after pamphlet, invincible in logic and erudition, sparkling with wit, and irritating in their utter coolness. Such pamphlets had not been seen since Pascal published the "Provincial Letters." Goetze found that he had taken up arms against a master in the arts of controversy, and before long he became well aware that he was worsted. Having brought the case before the Aulic Council, which consisted ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... 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 Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... be 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
... Rabelais, coarsest of humorists, 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 ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... profuse luxury, from Sardanapalus; while for 'lambiner', to dally or loiter over a task, they are indebted to Denis Lambin, a worthy Greek scholar of the sixteenth century, whom his adversaries accused of sluggish movement and wearisome diffuseness in style. Every reader of Pascal's Provincial Letters will remember Escobar, the great casuist among the Jesuits, whose convenient subterfuges for the relaxation of the moral law have there been made famous. To the notoriety which he thus acquired he owes his introduction into the French language; where 'escobarder' is used ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... course of 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, lively ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... not even 250 years old when he studied, as is customary, at the most celebrated[4] colleges of his planet, where he managed to figure out by pure willpower more than 50 of Euclid's propositions. That makes 18 more than Blaise Pascal, who, after having figured out 32 while screwing around, according to his sister's reports, later became a fairly mediocre geometer[5] and a very bad metaphysician. Towards his 450th year, near the end of his infancy, he dissected many small insects no more than 100 feet in ...
— Romans — Volume 3: Micromegas • Voltaire
... now against Huxley." He speaks of having had to abandon "old and long cherished ideas, which constituted the charm to me of the theoretical part of the science in my earlier day, when I believed with Pascal in the theory, as Hallam terms ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... who learns geography in our colleges learns to smile at the Hindoo mythology. If Catholicism has not suffered to an equal degree from the papal decision that the sun goes round the earth, this is because all intelligent Catholics now hold, with Pascal, that, in deciding the point at all, the Church exceeded her powers, and was, therefore, justly left destitute of that supernatural assistance which, in the exercise of her legitimate functions, the promise of her Founder authorized ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in the emotional movements of the religious nature. It was taking her at an unfair disadvantage, no doubt. In the old communion, some priest might have wrought upon her while in this condition, and we might have had at this very moment among us another Saint Theresa or Jacqueline Pascal. She found but a dangerous substitute in the spiritual companionship of a saint like ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... conscientious and strenuous toil, they were of unequal merit, or at least of unequal effectiveness. Some of them, particularly in his Apologetic courses, were brilliant and stimulating. Whenever he had a great personality to deal with, such as Origen, Grotius, or Pascal, or, in a quite different way, Voltaire, he rose to the full height of his powers. His criticisms of Hume, of Strauss, and of Renan, were also in their own way masterly. But a course which he had on Biblical Theology seemed to be hampered by a too rigid view of Inspiration, ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... 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 ...
— 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 |
