Pensées

Pascal died in 1662 with thousands of slips of paper and notebook fragments — preparatory notes for the apologetic of Christianity he never finished. The *Pensées* are these fragments, arranged by editors across fourteen thematic sections. They contain Pascal's most famous formulations: the wager that reason cannot decide between God's existence and non-existence but stakes everything either way; the terrifying "eternal silence of these infinite spaces"; the human being as "a thinking reed," wretched in self-knowledge yet noble in possessing it. W. F. Trotter's 1910 translation has been the standard English edition for over a century.