Blaise Pascal Quotes on Infinity (9 Quotes)


    The last proceeding of reason is to recognize that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it. There is nothing so conformable to reason as this disavowal of reason.

    Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it.

    Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.

    For after all what is man in nature A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.

    Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.


    What does this desire and this inability of ours proclaim to us but that there was once in man a genuine happiness, of which nothing now survives but the mark and the empty outline and this he vainly tries to fill from everything that lies around him, seeking from things that are not there the help that he does not get from those that are present Yet they are quite incapable of filling the gap, because this infinite gulf can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object - that is, God, Himself. He alone is man's veritable good, and since man has deserted Him it is a strange thing that there is nothing in nature that has not been capable of taking His place for man stars, sky, earth, elements, plants, cabbages, leeks, animals, insects, calves, serpents, fever, plague, war, famine, vices, adultery, incest. And since he has lost the true good, everything can equally appear to him as such - even his own destruction, though that is so contrary at once to God, to reason, and to nature.

    The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.

    I feel engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me. I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces alarms me.

    Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.


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