Key Ideas
Man is a thinking reed.
The eternal silence of infinite spaces terrifies.
We cannot sit quietly in a room.
The heart has its reasons.
The Wager.
Man is neither angel nor beast; whoever tries to act the angel acts the beast.
Pascal died before he could write his planned Apology for the Christian Religion. Friends found his notes cut into slips and threaded in bundles, some sorted under headings, many not, and published a selection in 1670. Editors have argued ever since over the order (the Lafuma and Sellier numberings are now standard). The fragmentary form, accidental as it is, gives the Pensées an urgency no finished treatise could have.
See Blaise Pascal.
Explore Next
related by shared connectionsMokṣa
Liberation — release from the cycle of rebirth and from all suffering, the highest goal of human life in the Hindu and Jain traditions (and, as nirvāṇa, in Buddhism). Every Indian school defines it differently, and the arguments over what it is, and how it is won, are the backbone of Indian philosophy.
Mirza Ghalib
The greatest poet of Urdu (1797–1869) — master of the ghazal, of wit, paradox, grief and doubt — who lived through the fall of the Mughal world in 1857 and wrote its elegy in letters and verse.
Michel de Montaigne
The inventor of the essay, who made himself the subject of his book — sceptical, curious, tolerant, candid — and asked, “Que sais-je?” — What do I know?
The Bhāgavata Purāṇa
The most beloved of the Purāṇas (c. 9th–10th century) — twelve books of devotion to Viṣṇu, culminating in the tenth book’s life of Kṛṣṇa: the butter-thief child, the cowherd, the lover of the gopīs, the god who dances with every devotee at once.
Dasein
Heidegger’s term for the human being — “being-there” — the entity whose own being is an issue for it.
Al-Ghazālī
Theologian, jurist and mystic whose Incoherence of the Philosophers attacked Avicenna’s Aristotelianism, anticipated Hume on causation, and whose spiritual autobiography records a crisis of doubt.