The Books
This page contains affiliate links. If you purchase through them, Classic Motivation may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
Who invented a calculating machine at nineteen, proved the existence of atmospheric pressure at twenty-four, experienced a religious conversion at thirty-one, and spent his final years writing the most searching defense of Christian faith ever composed — before dying at thirty-nine.
All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.Blaise Pascal — Pensées, 1670
Blaise Pascal was born in Clermont-Ferrand, France, in 1623. His mother died when he was three. His father, Etienne Pascal, was a tax official and amateur mathematician who recognized his son's extraordinary gifts and moved the family to Paris to give him access to the best intellectual circles in France. Pascal was doing original work in geometry by age twelve and had published a significant paper on conic sections at sixteen.
At eighteen he began constructing a mechanical calculator to assist his father's accounting work — the Pascaline, one of the first working mechanical calculators ever built. He spent the next several years in experiments on atmospheric pressure that conclusively demonstrated that what had been attributed to nature's abhorrence of a vacuum was simply the weight of air — a discovery that required both physical experimentation and serious argument against the prevailing Aristotelian physics.
In November 1654 he had what he described as a night of fire — a religious experience of devastating intensity that he recorded on a piece of parchment he sewed into the lining of every coat he owned for the rest of his life. The experience converted him from intellectual Christianity to a lived and passionate faith. He turned almost entirely from mathematics and science to theology and the writing that became the Pensées — his unfinished defense of Christianity, published posthumously in 1670. He died in 1662 at thirty-nine, in considerable pain from the illnesses that had plagued him throughout his life.
The Pensées — thoughts — is not a systematic treatise but a collection of fragments, arguments, observations, and aphorisms assembled from Pascal's notebooks after his death. Its most famous argument is Pascal's Wager: if God exists and you believe, you gain everything; if God exists and you don't believe, you lose everything; if God doesn't exist and you believe, you lose nothing; if God doesn't exist and you don't believe, you gain nothing. Therefore the rational bet is to believe. The argument is philosophically controversial, but its structure — decision-making under uncertainty, weighing asymmetric outcomes — influenced the development of probability theory and decision theory.
For this library, what matters most about Pascal is his devastating account of human psychology: the observation that most of what humans do is a form of diversion — an attempt to avoid sitting quietly with themselves and confronting the reality of their condition. Boredom, restlessness, the compulsive need for activity and entertainment — all of these are, for Pascal, symptoms of a deeper condition: the human inability to face the fact of mortality, uncertainty, and the ultimate inadequacy of every finite thing to satisfy the infinite longing that seems to be built into human nature.
This is not merely a religious observation. Every subsequent thinker who has addressed the problem of distraction and the difficulty of genuine presence — from Thoreau to Kierkegaard to Frankl — is working in territory Pascal mapped. His observation that all of humanity's problems stem from the inability to sit quietly in a room alone is one of the most compressed and most accurate psychological insights ever written.
The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.Blaise Pascal — Pensées, 1670
Published posthumously from his notebooks. The sections on diversion, boredom, and the human condition are essential regardless of one's views on the theological arguments. Read the Krailsheimer translation.
Read Free Online →This page contains affiliate links. If you purchase through them, Classic Motivation may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.