The purpose in offering the Great Shorter Works is “to make essential classical Pascalian literature, other than the Provincial Letters and the Pensées, available to discriminating readers who might find the original texts difficult and discouraging.” Preceded by a valuable introduction, forty-five letters are presented, beginning with a letter written when Pascal was a precocious twenty and ending with his will at thirty-eight. These remarkable letters, covering a nineteen-year period of intense activity, reflect the variety of Pascal’s interests. For this reason, among others, they are of value, not only to those who are interested in Christianity, but also to those who are interested in physics, or mathematics, or philosophy. Blaise Pascal bequeathed to the world many tangible legacies, including the calculating machine, the barometer, the hydraulic press, and the omnibus. In his letters he has bequeathed that quality of mind and spirit which surpasses the tangible and illumines life.

Contents: Thoughts on Mind and Sty The Misery of Man Without God; Of the Necessity of the Wager; Of the Means of Belief; Justice and the Reason of Effects; The Philosophers; Morality and Doctri Fundamentals of the Christian Religion; Perpetuity; Typology; Prophecies; Proofs of Jesus Christ; The Miracles. Various Letters. Minor Works: Epitaph of M. Pascal; Prayer; Comparison Between Christians of Early Times and Those of Today; Discourses on the Condition of the Great; On the Conversion of the Sinner; Conversation on Epictetus and Montaig Art of Persuasion; Discourse on the Passion of Love; Of the Geometrical Sprit; Preface to the Treatise on Vacuum; New Fragment of the Treatise on Vacuum.

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) earned recognition as a renowned mathematician, physicist--and a man after God's heart. As he came to the forefront of geometry and physics, he turned his considerable analytical abilities to study religion or, as he said, to "contemplate the greatness and the misery of man." Pascal's classic defense of Christianity--Pensées--persuaded many a skeptic in his time. Today, editor James Houston has organized Pascal's meditations into a logical progression of thought that contemporary readers can enjoy in Mind on Fire. Described as a "Masterpiece of theological scholarship," Mind on Fire also includes selections from Pascal's Letters to a Provincial, a description of his conversion in his own words.

Created by the seventeenth-century philosopher and mathematician Pascal, the essays contained in Human Happiness are a curiously optimistic look at whether humans can ever find satisfaction and real joy in life – or whether a belief in God is a wise gamble at best. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves – and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives – and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

The French mathematician and Jansenist philosopher's classic of Christian thought, along with other religious writings.

This book considers Pascal's modes of writing - whether he is arguing with the strict puritanical modes of Church politics, in the guise of a naive 'provincial' trying to understand the Jesuitical approach (Les Provinciales), or meditating on the ways to present his own thoughts on religion (Apologia) to the world outside Port-Royal, the convent his sister Jacqueline had persuaded him to enter. Pascal's so-called 'worldly period', in which his relation to his libertine friends motivated his celebrated 'wager' about belief, is discussed alongside his Jansenist writings, his meditations on thinking about thinking, and finally his invention of the first means of public transport in Paris, shortly before his untimely death at 39 following a lifetime of illness.

"Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true," declared Pascal in his Penseés. "The cure for this," he explained, "is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is." Motivated by the 17th-century view of the supremacy of human reason, Pascal (1623–1662) intended to write an ambitious apologia for Christianity, in which he argued the inability of reason to address metaphysical problems. While Pascal's untimely death prevented his completion of the work, these fragments published posthumously in 1670 as Penseés remain a vital part of religious and philosophical literature. Introduction by T. S. Eliot.