Men are so inevitably mad that not to be mad would be to give a mad twist to madness.

Just as all things speak about God to those that know Him, and reveal Him to those that love Him, they also hide Him from all those that neither seek nor know Him.

There is a wide yawning black infinity. In every direction the extension is endless, the sensation of depth is overwhelming. And the darkness is immortal. Where light exists, it is pure, blazing, fierce; but light...

—Pascal, if I remember rightly, would not suffer his mother to kiss him as he feared the contact of her sex.

Velmi brzy začal projevovat zájem o matematiku – dokonce tak silný, že mu otec, který nechtěl zanedbat jeho filozofické, jazykové a humanitní vzdělání, zakázal v jedenácti letech číst matematické knihy, dokud nedosáhne věku patnácti let....

What Pascal overlooked was the hair-raising possibility that God might out-Luther Luther. A special area in hell might be reserved for those who go to mass. Or God might punish those whose faith is prompted...

Kepler’s discovery would not have been possible without the doctrine of conics. Now contemporaries of Kepler—such penetrating minds as Descartes and Pascal—were abandoning the study of geometry … because they said it was so UTTERLY...