Introduction

'Man is but a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.' After Pascal's death nearly a thousand slips of paper covered with notes were found among his belongings, some carefully worked passages, some only a few words; these are the Pensées. He portrays the greatness and the wretchedness of man, suspended between two abysses, the infinitely great and the infinitely small, numbed by diversion and habit and afraid to face his condition. 'The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.' The famous 'wager' argues that if you believe in God and win, you win everything, and if you lose, you lose nothing. He distinguishes the spirit of geometry from the spirit of finesse, and writes that 'the heart has its reasons, which reason does not know'. This unfinished book is a summit of French prose.