Pascal

A selection from the selection "From the Pensées," translated by Jacques Barzun, in Arts Education Policy Review, Vol. 104, No. 3 (January/February 2003), pp 36-39:

4. Geometry, intuition. - True eloquence has no use for eloquence, true morality has no use for morality; that is to say, the morality of the judgment, which has not rules, has no use for the morality of the intellect.... To have no use for philosophy is truly to philosophize.

7. The greater one's mind is, the more one finds men of original mind. Ordinary persons find no differences between men....

11. All great amusements are dangerous to the Christian life; but among all those which the world has invented there is none more to be feared than the theatre. It is a representation of the passions so natural and so delicate that it excites them and gives birth to them in our hearts, and, above all, to that of love, especially when it is represented as very chaste and virtuous. For the more innocent it appears to innocent souls, the more they are likely to be touched by it. Its violence pleases our self-love, which immediately forms a desire to produce the same effects which are seen so well represented; and, at the same time, we quiet our scruples by relying on the decency of the feelings that we see there; and so pure souls are freed of any apprehension, since they imagine that it cannot hurt their purity to love with a love that seems to them so reasonable.

Thus we leave the theatre with our heart so filled with all the beauty and tenderness of love, the soul and the mind so persuaded of its innocence, that we are quite ready to receive its first impressions, or rather to seek an opportunity of awakening them in the heart of another, in order that we may receive the same pleasures and the same sacrifices as those we have seen so well represented in the theatre....

29. When we see a natural style, we are astonished and delighted; for we expected to see an author, and we find a man....

35. We should not be able to say of a man, "He is a mathematician," or "a preacher," or "eloquent"; but that he is "a gentleman." This universal quality alone pleases me. It is a bad sign when, on seeing a person, you remember his book. I should prefer you to see no quality till you meet it and have occasion to use it....

43. Certain writers, speaking of their works, say: "My book," "My commentary," "My history," etc. They resemble middle-class people who own their own house and always have "My home" on their tongue. They would do better to say: "Our book," "Our commentary," "Our history," etc., because there is in them usually more of other people's then their own [these days, ghost writers, research assistants, and "plagiarizees"].