On Blaise Pascal

"Pascal's Thoughts are not a book. We must bear this observation in mind, if we are to judge of them aright. They are not a book; perhaps they may be two, or even more. They are — if we must give them a name and define them - they are Pascal himself - whole Pascal, excepting in so far as he was a geometrician, properly so called, and a natural philosopher. The Thoughts are only the papers on which this great man threw out, from time to time, all that occupied his powerful mind, until the excess of physical malady reduced him to complete inaction, and put, so to speak, the seals upon his genius. Great pains have been taken, and not without success, to reduce these scattered materials, by means of art, into a kind of whole. Sometimes, perhaps, the secret of the writer has been guessed; possibly, in certain cases, his intention has been entirely misunderstood." (Alexandre R Vinet, "Studies on Pascal", 1859

"One striking peculiarity of mathematics is its unlimited power of evolving examples and problems. A student may read a book of Euclid, or a few chapters of Algebra, and within that limited range of knowledge it is possible to set him exercises as real and as interesting as the propositions themselves which he has studied; deductions which might have pleased the Greek geometers, and algebraic propositions which Pascal and Fermat would not have disdained to investigate." (Isaac Todhunter, "Private Study of Mathematics"  [in "Conflict of Studies and other Essays" 1873)

"Most important for the history of science is the fact that Liber de Ludo Aleae,'The Book of Games of Chance', contains the first study of the principles of probability. [...] it would seem much more just to date the beginnings of probability theory from Cardano's treatise rather than the customary reckoning from Pascal's discussions with his friend de Méré and the ensuing correspondence with Fermat [...] at least a century after Cardano [...]" (Oystein Ore [Ed.], "Cardano the Gambling Scholar", 1953)

"Pascal was no obscurantist, but he measured how far science (esprit de géometrie) may go and become irrelevant to the problems of human destiny. The achievements of science are not denied by this stand, nor are they dismissed as the ostrich with its head burrowed in sand dismisses reality. What is asserted is that our original endowments as they reflect on the data of experience, are, with all their limitations and imperfections, the only necessary and indispensable means by which we confront existence, the only weapon commensurate with our struggle." (Thomas Molnar, "The Decline of the Intellectual", 1961)

"To philosophize is always to rehabilitate the essential importance of the human dimension, and hence the dignity of man. This was the meaning of the Socratic quest, and also the meaning of Pascal's anguish at the threshold of the Cartesian revolution in science. In this respect, Pascal is an even more significant figure of philosophy than Socrates: his was the first brutal reaction to the claim of science to remove man from his position as a privileged being in creation; nobody has so far been able to improve upon his demonstration why science is unsatisfactory to give man meaning and to fill his heart with joy." (Thomas Molnar, "The Decline of the Intellectual", 1961)

"Pascal's Triangle and all the early work in probability answered only one question: what is the probability of such-and-such an outcome? The answer to that question has limited value in most cases, because it leaves us with no sense of generality." (Peter L Bernstein, "Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk", 1996)