Advanced Search Filters
Filter search results by source, date, and more with our premium search tools.
" "Why should I choose to divide my ethics into four rather than six? Why should I define virtue as four, or two, or one? Why as desist and resist rather than 'follow nature' or 'discharge your private business without injustice', like Plato, or anything else?
'But,' you will say, 'there everything is summed up in a word. - 'Yes, but that is no good unless you explain it.' And when you come to explain it, as soon as you open up this precept which contains all the others, out they all come in the original confusion that you wanted to avoid. Thus when they are all enclosed in one they are concealed and useless, as if they were in a box, and they only come to light in their natural confusion. Nature has laid them down, without enclosing one inside another.
Blaise Pascal (19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) was a French mathematician, logician, physicist and theologian.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Advanced Search Filters
Filter search results by source, date, and more with our premium search tools.
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
Advanced Search Filters
Filter search results by source, date, and more with our premium search tools.
This art, which I call the art of persuading, and which, properly speaking, is simply the process of perfect methodical proofs, consists of three essential parts: of defining the terms of which we should avail ourselves by clear definitions, of proposing principles of evident axioms to prove the thing in question; and of always mentally substituting in the demonstrations the definition in the place of the thing defined.