Pensées

by Blaise Pascal

"Blaise Pascal, the precociously brilliant contemporary of Descartes, was a gifted mathematician and physicist, but it is his unfinished apologia for the Christian religion upon which his reputation now rests. The Pensees is a collection of philosophical fragments, notes and essays in which he explores the contradictions of human nature in psychological, social, metaphysical and, above all, theological terms. Mankind emerges from Pascal's analysis as a wretched and desolate creature within an impersonal universe, but also as a being whose existence can be transformed through faith in God's...