“What a fantastic creature is man, a novelty, a monstrosity, chaotic, contradictory, prodigious, judge of all things, feeble earthworm, bearer of truth, mine of uncertainty and error, glory and refuse of the universe! Who can undo this tangle?”
Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century French mathematician, physicist, moralist and Christian, knew how to write. For that alone, the Pensées, his most famous work, would make an enjoyable addition to any summer reading list. But as France celebrates the 400th anniversary of his birth this year, there are other reasons for the world to re-engage with the bracing quality of his thinking.
