Word: pascale
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...only approve," wrote Pascal in one of the more peevish passages of his Pensées, "of those who groan aloud in their search for the truth." Literature, from Greek tragedy to T. S. Eliot, has been vastly benefited by truth-seekers who could out-groan a Maine fog horn; but it has also had to put up with a host of novelists and poets who forget that the surest way to ruin a good groan is to work it to death and stuff its remains into the machinery of their writing...
...always a lace-and-ribbon rather than a cap-and-sweater socialist. He adored reason and persuasion above emotion and force. He also loved the elegance of the society he deplored. He liked to recite by rote for hours at a stretch from Pascal, La Bruyere, Saint-Evremond. He knew Anatole France, Zola and Proust. He wrote Latin verse, brilliant dramatic reviews for avant-garde magazines, a study of Stendhal, an imaginary talk with Goethe, a book on marriage (dedicated to his wife) that shocked the bourgeoisie because it favored as much premarital experimental love for women...
Seed of the Abacus. The calculating machines that are Bessie's ancestors have roots far back in the past. The abacus, used in ancient Egypt and still used in much of Asia, is a simple figuring device. The French mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-62) designed a mechanical calculator when Louis XIII was king. The present adding machine is a remote descendant of Pascal's design...
...Father Feeney is a man who claims he has the road to salvation, and he called me damned, laying his hand upon me in so saying, for finding another road from his to the Christ he pretends to revere. He told me yesterday that Ernest Renan, Charles Dickens, Blaise Pascal, Thomas Merton ('a weak T. S. Eliot'), and Bishop Wright were damned...
...fact that the Church would allow weaklings like Pascal to die in her bosom shows how charitable and maternal she is even to her most foolish children once they are sorry for their mistakes...