Blaise Pascal
1623-1662 17th century
The heart that knows God where reason alone cannot reach, and the smallness of man before the infinite.
Who was Blaise Pascal?
A mathematician and physicist of genius, inventor of a calculating machine in his teens, he underwent on the night of 23 November 1654 an experience of God that he recorded on a sheet sewn into the lining of his coat, the Memorial. He then partly set science aside to defend the faith and side with the Jansenists. Ill and dead at thirty-nine, he left unfinished the Pensées, notes toward a defence of Christianity.
In their own words
The heart has its reasons which reason does not know.
Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars.
The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.