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Updated: May 16, 2025
Greater than all that is here, in silent moments, when the senses are tired and disappointment steals over us, the truth of the insignificance of things bursts upon us. "Man is but a reed, the feeblest thing in nature," says Pascal in the Pensées, "but he is a thinking reed. The universe need not mass its forces to accomplish his destruction. A breath, a drop of water may destroy him.
Something more than this has always been asked by sensitively religious minds. Success fails to bring the gratification it promises. The wish granted, the mind turns from it in satiety. Not this, after all, was what we sought. The acutest thinkers have felt this. Pascal in his Pensées has such expressions as these: “The present is never our aim.
Christian apology has its own sphere, no less than science; and the evidence which the one desiderates is not the supreme life and power of the other. It may not on this account be the less satisfactory or the less rational when the whole life of humanity is looked at. If we ask ourselves, in conclusion, what is the chief charm of the ‘Pensées,’ we feel inclined to answer,—their touching reality.
When they returned the good old doctor sat down to read the Bible, and he says, "I gave Boswell Les Pensées de Pascal, that he might not interrupt me." Of this very copy Boswell says: "I preserve the book with reverence." I wonder who has it now?
He put his whole soul into what moved him for the time; and a certain excess of passionate intellectual emotion evidently speaks in some of the most striking of the ‘Pensées.’ We may imagine how in some—perhaps in many—cases they would have been toned down had he lived to revise and refashion them into a harmonious whole.
And quietly, heavily, like an irrevocable sentence, there came, breathed to him as it were from that winter cold and loneliness, words that he had read an hour or two before, in the little red book beside his hand words in which the gayest of French poets has fixed, as though by accident, the most traginc of all human cries 'Quittez le long espoir et les vastes pensées.
The literary history of the ‘Pensées’ is a very curious one. They first appeared in the end of 1669, in a small duodecimo volume, with the appropriate motto, “Pendent opera interrupta.” Their preparation for the press had been a subject of much anxiety to Pascal’s friends.
There is nothing in it to be proud of, but something, after all, to console one. February 4, 1874. He became professor of Latin oratory at the College de France in 1855, and a member of the Institute in January, 1880. His admirable edition of the "Pensees de Pascal" is well-known.
It is to be hoped that the friends to whom the charge of his memory has been specially committed may see their way in the future, if not to a formal biography, which is very likely better left unattempted, at least to a volume of Letters, which would complete the "Journal Intime," as Joubert's "Correspondence" completes the "Pensees."
"Confiteor Deo omnipotenti," murmured the priest; and tremblingly one little sister followed the words, "Je confesse a Dieu, tout puissant que j'ai beaucoup peche par pensees c'est ma faute c'est ma faute c'est ma tres grande faute." The organ pealed forth as mass ended, the throng slowly filed out, and the sisters paced through the courtway back into the brown convent walls.
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