Pensées from Pascal

Berkeley, Friday, August 2, 2019 4:22 PM

Transcripts from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées:

“The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things. I say that the heart naturally loves the Universal Being, and also itself naturally, according as it gives itself to them; and it hardens itself against one or the other as its will. You have rejected the one, and kept the other. Is it by reason that you love yourself?

It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason. This, then, is faith: God felt by the heart, not by the reason.

Faith is a gift of God; do not believe that we said it was a gift of reasoning. Other religions do not say this of their faith. They only gave reasoning in order to arrive at it, and yet it does not bring them to it.

The knowledge of God is very far form the love of Him.

Heart, instinct, principles.” (Pascal, 1670, 277-281)

References

Pascal, B., 1670. Pensées, WF Trotter (trans.) in 1958, introduction by TS Eliot. The edition I read was from Dover, 2003.