Blaise Pascal (1972 TV Movie)

Pierre Arditi: Blaise Pascal

Quotes 

• Jacqueline Pascal : She bore us a little mule. You should go see it instead of tiring yourself. Your calculations will never rival the beauty of God's creatures.

  Blaise Pascal : Aren't these also part of creation?

• Étienne Pascal : Don't let your successes infect you with delusions of grandeur.

  Blaise Pascal : Father, I know a man is truly great when he knows he is nothing.

  Étienne Pascal : Hold fast to that idea and you will prosper.

• Blaise Pascal : How can you decide what is of God and what is not? Isn't God outside our reach, concealed by the mediocrity of our understanding? Do you really believe that the ability to recognize and to measure the specific weight of air at various altitudes, which I will endeavor to do, makes us less wretched in the eyes of God?

• Blaise Pascal : Science has two extremes that touch each other: The first is pure natural ignorance. The other is where great souls arrive after traversing all that can be learned by man, to find that they know nothing. Those in the middle, who've overcome natural ignorance but not yet attained the other, "the ignorance of the wise," have a smattering of science and act knowing. They are the ones who spread confusion and misjudge everything.

• Blaise Pascal : The vacuum, the void, is the face of the infinite. If I seek the void in nature, it's to discover its mirror in the heart of man. When I feel the void consume my vanity, when my thoughts are freed from vain ideas and desires, God, whom I know only through reason, and therefore do not know - Can you know or love someone through reason alone? Perhaps God will deign to consider the place I've made for him inside me. A place, not of the finite and miserable dimensions of my reason, but of the infinite dimensions of the void. Let God show himself and I shall know him.

  Jacqueline Pascal : There are other paths to God. Wait for him in silence and he will come. Not the God of philosophers, but the living Christ! Read the Gospels. They teach all you need know of the world.

  Blaise Pascal : Yes, but nature bears the mark of God, and I believe charity can only be true if it is enlightened by understanding and knowledge and man's only true knowledge is to acknowledge that there is an infinity of things beyond his grasp. Our knowledge is nothing if we do not realize this.

• Blaise Pascal : The infinite universe we live in will never cease to be infinite, while our knowledge will never cease to be finite, limited, in spite of all the new things we learn.

• Blaise Pascal : We tread with uncertainty, for we are caught between an infinity and an abyss of quantity, an infinity and an abyss of movements, and infinity and an abyss of time from which we can learn to truly know ourselves and enrich ourselves with thoughts worth more than the whole of geometry.

• Blaise Pascal : To truly understand infinity, requires an infinity of methods and only God can know them, for only he is infinite.

• Blaise Pascal : Since God is infinitely incomprehensible, then understanding him by means of reason is a contradiction in terms. It is not because our reason is limited that we should have a limited idea of God. God is or he is not. Reason can decide nothing here except to admit there is an infinity of things beyond understanding.

• Blaise Pascal : You're not a skeptic, because skeptics know man has a deep need for certitude, and a man like you wouldn't be satisfied with less. Nor dogmatic, because we all know that life is uncertain and in constant flux.

• Blaise Pascal : Suffering is a gift of God, for, tormented by illness, deprived of our possessions and our pleasures, freed of the passions which afflict us all our lives, we welcome death with joy.

• [last lines] 

  Blaise Pascal : May God never abandon me.