Pascal’s Pensées (by Blaise Pascal)

A collection of thoughts and reflections by the great Christian thinker, Blaise Pascal.

Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher in the early 1600s.  The Pensées (literally, “thoughts”) represented a defense of the Christian religion by Pascal. Pascal’s religious conversion led him into a life of asceticism, and the Pensées was in many ways his life’s work.

The Pensées is in fact a name given posthumously to his fragments, which he had been preparing for an apology for the Christian Religion and which was never completed.  Although the Pensées appears to consist of ideas and jottings, some of which are incomplete, it is believed that Pascal had, prior to his death in 1662, already planned out the order of the book and had begun the task of cutting and pasting his draft notes into a coherent form.

He discusses with great wonder and beauty the human condition, the incarnation, God, the meaning of life, revelation, and the paradoxes of Christianity. He passionately argues for the Christian faith, using both argumentation and his famous “Wager.”

The first version of the numerous scraps of paper found after his death appeared in print as a book in 1669.