“What kind of freak is man! He is the glory and the scum of the universe!”

Pascal bluntly accuses the human race to be ‘thinking reeds’, people who are easily influenced, bent, and manipulated. Much like an existentialist, Pascal feels that it is human nature to be destructive and to decay from the moment of birth. We are wretched; however, unlike an existentialist, Pascal believes in hope for the world in the form of faith and knowledge.


“It is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own self…”

Pascal openly admitted to a human’s inability to prove God’s existence. We as people cannot explain everything. He thus comes up with Pascal's Wager, which attempts to logically convince people that believing and trusting in God is the best decision they will ever make. In addition to this, he claims that sometimes the heart can affect human reason, and that the heart is the “intuitive mind” rather than the “geometrical mind” (calculating, reasoning, logic.). We are thus most of the time controlled by our desires and natural drive to be destructive.