Is There a Reason to Believe?

"All our reasoning reduces itself to yielding to feeling....
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 at 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...it was a gift of reasoning." - Blaise Pascal

Taking Stock of Our Place in Time and Space

Let us, then, take our compass;

we are something, [but]...we are not everything.

The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the nothing;

and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the infinite.

Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature.

• Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) The Columbia World of Quotations. 1996.

Status Update: Still Miserable

...imagine a number of men in chains and all condemned to death, where some are killed each day in the sight of the others... those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows and wait their turn, looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope.
[This] is an image of the condition of man.


...here [on earth] is no lasting and real satisfaction, that our pleasures are only vanity, that our evils are infinite...that death, which threatens us every moment, must infallibly place us within a few years under the dreadful necessity of being forever either annihilated or unhappy.

• Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) from The Columbia World of Quotations. 1996.