in Quotes & Aphorisms (Wisdom)
Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.
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Citations by Blaise Pascal
The art of persuasion consists as much in that of pleasing as in that of convincing, so much more are men governed by caprice than by reason!
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Wisdom)
One must know oneself, if this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.
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If it is pleasing to observe in nature her desire to paint God in all his works, in which we see some traces of him because they are his images, how much more just is it to consider in the productions of minds the efforts which they make to imitate the essential truth, even in shunning it, and to remark wherein they attain it and wherein they wander from it, as I have endeavored to do in this study.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Wisdom)
Our notion of symmetry is derived from the human face. Hence, we demand symmetry horizontally and in breath only, not vertically nor in depth.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Wisdom)
The method of not erring is sought by all the world. The logicians profess to guide it, the geometricians alone attain it, and apart from science, and the imitations of it, there are no true demonstrations.
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Rules for Axioms. I. Not to omit any necessary principle without asking whether it is admittied, however clear and evident it may be. Ii. Not to demand, in axioms, any but things that are perfectly evident in themselves.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Wisdom)
Five [of the above] rules are of absolute necessity, and cannot be dispensed with without essential defect and often without error.
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Logic has borrowed, perhaps, the rules of geometry, without comprehending their force... it does not thence follow that they have entered into the spirit of geometry, and I should be greatly averse... to placing them on a level with that science that teaches the true method of directing reason.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Wisdom)
Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being.
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