Pensees (Penguin Classics)

Blaise Pascal (1623-62) intended the unfinished notes and essays which make up his Pensees as a systematic and uncompromising defense of Christian belief. Shot through with aphoristic brilliance and gleaming with scientific incisiveness, the Pensees display a vision of humanity's weakness and the futility of worldly life that is awesome in its rigor and force. Whether his subject is the human heart or the famous wager of faith, Pascal writes with a unique blend of lucidity and eloquence; his Pensees are provocative, paradoxical and disarmingly personal.