| Author Quoted | Blaise Pascal |
| Title Quoted | Provincial Letters, Pensees, Scientific Treatises. / translated by W.F.Trotter, in Great Books of the Western World |
| Date (Year/Month/Day) | 1939/09/13 |
| Imprint | Chicago : Encyclopedia Britannica. 1952 |
| Quotation | A model sentence from Pascal. Maybe everyone who wants to write should, before he even starts, consider this sentence as much for its balance and its construction as for what it says: it is the beginning of all writing: "Il ne faut pas avoir l'ême fort elevee pour comprendere qu'il n'y a point ici de satisfaction veritable et solide, que tous nos plaisirs ne sont que vanite, que nos maux sont infinis, et qu'enfin la mort, qui nous menace à chaque instant, doit infailliblement nous mettre, dans peu d'annees, dans l'horrible necessite d'être eternellement ou aneantis ou Malheureux." ["We do not require a very lofty soul to understand that here is no real and lasting satisfaction; that our pleasures are only vanity; that our evils are infinite; and lastly, that death, which threatens us every moment, must infallibly place us within a few years under the dreadful necessity of being for ever either annihilated or unhappy."] Pensees III. 194. [Note 14: Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters, Pensees, Scientific Treatises... p.207] |
| Quotation Source | Run to the mountain: The Story of a Vocation. The journals of Thomas Merton, Volume 1, 1939-1941.; Edited by Patrick Hart, O.C.S.O. / San Francisco : Harper Collins. 1995, p. 21 |
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| Link to Merton's Copy |
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