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Pensées
1670 · translated from the French · 406 pages
Pensées
by Blaise Pascal
Why our edition. The free text is a proofread transcription from Project Gutenberg rather than a page scan, so there is no scanning damage to report. What ours adds is the typesetting: one clean file, in three formats, without the boilerplate. The full French text is public domain and free — linked below.
On this page: a summary of Pensées, which translation this edition uses, and our clean edition as a PDF or EPUB.
Pascal died at thirty-nine leaving behind bundles of notes for an apologetic he never wrote, and the fragments were published posthumously in 1670. What survives is the most penetrating account in French of the human condition as Pascal saw it — the wretchedness and greatness of man, diversion, the wager, the hiddenness of God — all of it addressed to the intelligent unbeliever he took his reader to be.
The convert behind the argument
An honest note about this entry: Pascal does not meet the criterion the rest of this shelf is built on. He was a Catholic from childhood, and the famous night of fire in November 1654 intensified a faith he already had rather than creating one. He is here because the argument is aimed at exactly the reader every other author on this shelf once was.
Summary
The Pensées are not a book but the materials for one. Pascal was working toward a sustained apology for the Christian religion when he died in 1662; what he left was a mass of notes, some grouped into bundles and some loose, which his family and the Port-Royal circle arranged and published in 1670. Every edition since has had to decide on an order, and they differ.
The argument, so far as the fragments show it, begins in anthropology rather than theology: man is at once wretched and great, incapable of rest, driven into diversion to avoid thinking about his condition. The proposal is that only the Christian account — greatness by creation, wretchedness by fall — fits both halves of what we actually observe.
The best-known fragments are the wager, the two infinities, the thinking reed, and the passage in which Christ speaks — ‘thou wouldst not seek Me, if thou hadst not found Me.’ Pascal’s manner is aphoristic and unfinished by accident rather than design, which is part of why the book has never stopped being read.
Who was Blaise Pascal?
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) was a French mathematician, physicist and writer, born at Clermont in Auvergne, who did foundational work on probability, the vacuum and mechanical calculation before turning increasingly to religious questions.
He was associated with Port-Royal and the Jansenist movement, and wrote the Provincial Letters against the Jesuits. He experienced an intense religious event on the night of 23 November 1654, recorded on a scrap of parchment he sewed into his coat and carried for the rest of his life. He was, however, a believer from childhood — which is why we flag him plainly as the exception on this shelf.
Which translation of Pensées is this?
W.F. Trotter’s English translation is free at Project Gutenberg; the Gutenberg text is printed with an introduction by T.S. Eliot. Our edition sets the Trotter translation of Pascal’s own text.
This is a clean reading edition of Pascal's Pensées, in the English translation of W. F. Trotter. Pascal's French and Trotter's English are both in the public domain, and we set the text from the Project Gutenberg transcription.
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) had done his great work in mathematics and physics before he was thirty. On the night of 23 November 1654 he had an experience he wrote down on a scrap of parchment and sewed into the lining of his coat, where it was found after his death: FIRE. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars. He spent his last years gathering material for a defence of the Christian religion that he did not live to write. What survives is the notes for it, on scraps, in fragments, arranged after his death by other hands. That is this book, and its unfinished state is not a defect in it.
A note on what we did not include. The transcription we worked from carries an introduction by T. S. Eliot, written in 1931. It is not Pascal's, it is not Trotter's, and its copyright is not a question we should answer for ourselves, so it is not here. Neither is the transcriber's own note and errata table, which belongs to the making of the file rather than to the book. Trotter's notes and his index are here: the index refers to the numbers of the pensées and not to pages, so it works in this edition exactly as it worked in his.
A note on what we changed. The transcription kept the line breaks of the printed page, so 1,720 paragraphs arrived as columns of short lines; we joined them back, which is whitespace and nothing else. Italics were marked in the source with underscores and are set as italics here. We broke the longest paragraphs at sentences already ended, leaving Pascal's numbered fragments alone. One citation in the notes read "P, 226" where the other three hundred and seventy-nine read "P."; it now reads "P." as well.
We corrected nothing else. A checker offered forty-six candidates and every one was Latin — nimis read as "nim is", dormit as "dorm it", Esdram as a misspelling of Esdras. Pascal's Latin is Pascal's.
The free transcription is linked from this book's page.
Common questions
- Was Pascal a convert to Christianity?
- No, and we say so plainly. Pascal was raised Catholic and remained one; the celebrated ‘night of fire’ of 23 November 1654 deepened an existing faith rather than beginning it. He appears on this shelf because the Pensées are addressed to the unbeliever, not because he was one.
- What is Pascal’s wager?
- A fragment arguing that, under genuine uncertainty about God’s existence, the stakes are asymmetric: what is risked by believing is finite and what is gained is infinite. It is one argument among many in the Pensées and was never intended to stand alone.
- Why are the Pensées disordered?
- Because Pascal died before writing the book they were notes for. He left bundles of fragments, some sorted and some not; every editor since 1670 has had to impose an order, and different editions number the fragments differently.
A note on the text. Pensées is in the public domain. What you’re buying is our edition: the careful typesetting and correction. The original text is also available free here.
That free text is already well proofread — we measure about 0.8 errors per 1,000 characters. What our edition adds is the typesetting, not a rescue: one clean file, in the formats above, without the archive boilerplate.
Related reading
On the same shelf
Observations on the History and Evidences of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ
Gilbert West · 1747
Also listed in Old Christian Books Worth Reading.
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Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners
John Bunyan · 1666
Also listed in Old Christian Books Worth Reading.
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A View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion
Soame Jenyns · 1776
Also listed in Old Christian Books Worth Reading.
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