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Second edition of Blaise Pascal's Pensées, 1670 The Pensées ( Thoughts ) is a collection of fragments written by the French 17th-century philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal . Pascal's religious conversion led him into a life of asceticism , and the Pensées was in many ways his life's work. [ 1 ]
Blaise Pascal [a] (19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, and Catholic writer. Pascal was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen .
In the letters, Pascal's tone combines the fervor of a convert with the wit and polish of a man of the world. Their style meant that, quite apart from their religious influence, the Provincial Letters were popular as a literary work. Adding to that popularity was Pascal's use of humor, mockery, and satire in his arguments.
T. S. Eliot's 1925 poem "The Hollow Men" quotes, as its first epigraph, a line from Heart of Darkness: "Mistah Kurtz – he dead." [ 66 ] Eliot had planned to use a quotation from the climax of the tale as the epigraph for The Waste Land , but Ezra Pound advised against it. [ 67 ]
The poems of the Canadian poet Frederick George Scott have also been cited as an example of Victorian pessimism, [89] as have the poems of the American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson. [90] During this period, artistic representations of nature transformed, from benevolent, uplifting and god-like, to actively hostile, competitive, or indifferent.
Edmund Musgrave Barttelot, who became notorious for his brutality, is one of the historical persons that may have inspired Kurtz's persona.. Kurtz's persona is generally understood to derive from the notoriously brutal history of the so-called Congo Free State, a territory that existed as the private property of King Leopold II from 1885 to 1908 until it was taken over by Belgium and became a ...
This volume also includes Heart of Darkness and The End of the Tether, stories concerned with the themes of maturity and old age, respectively. "Youth" depicts a young man's first journey to the Far East. It is narrated by Charles Marlow who is also the narrator of Lord Jim, Chance, and Heart of Darkness. The narrator's introduction suggests ...
Pascal's wager is a philosophical argument advanced by Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), seventeenth-century French mathematician, philosopher, physicist, and theologian. [1] This argument posits that individuals essentially engage in a life-defining gamble regarding the belief in the existence of God .