Pensées

The Pensées are the working notes of an unfinished book. Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician, physicist, and Jansenist apologist, had begun in the early 1660s to gather material for a sustained defence of Christianity addressed to the cultivated unbelievers of his time. He died in 1662, aged thirty-nine, before the work was complete. What he left behind was a stack of slips of paper which his sister and the Port-Royal community gathered, organized as best they could, and published in 1670.

The fragments are extraordinary. They contain the famous wager; the celebrated thinking reed meditation; the great chapter on the disproportion between the human being and the two infinites; and dozens of one-sentence aphorisms that have entered the general European language. The Pensées have remained, for three centuries, one of the supreme works of European religious writing.