For most of this year, Nietzsche has been my companion on this blog. So it feels almost like a provocation to spend the first dark weeks of November with Blaise Pascal: mathematician, inventor of one of the first calculating machines, and the Christian apologist whose faith Nietzsche spent his life arguing against.

And yet Nietzsche himself admitted the pull. In Ecce Homo he confesses that he does not merely read Pascal, he loves him, “as the most instructive victim of Christianity.” Reading the Pensées now, I understand why. Whatever you think of his conclusions, Pascal looks at the human condition with a precision that is hard to get away from.

The Pensées were never a finished book. They are fragments, notes for an apology of Christianity that Pascal did not live to write. What follows are the passages I underlined, grouped by the themes that kept coming back.

1. A Creature Built for Self-Deception

Pascal starts with a diagnosis, not with God. Before he offers any consolation, he wants us to see how badly we are equipped to know anything:

“Nothing shows him the truth. Everything deceives him. The two sources of truth, reason and the senses, besides lacking sincerity, deceive each other in turn.”

That is a strange thing to read in 2026, surrounded by feeds tuned to tell us what we already believe. Pascal saw a human being caught between two unreliable witnesses, each correcting the other and neither fully trustworthy. Elsewhere he adds a line that sounds as if it was written about our technology:

“As if nothing were more unfortunate for man than to be dominated by his own inventions.”

He was probably thinking of custom and imagination, the fictions we create and then obey. But the sentence fits phones and algorithms just as well.

2. The Room

This is the fragment everyone knows, and the one I underlined hardest:

“I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”

Pascal’s argument about divertissement, diversion, is ruthless. We hunt, gamble, chase promotions and fill every hour, not because we want the hare or the money, but because we cannot stand being alone with ourselves. The noise is the point. It keeps us from thinking about our condition.

In Helsinki, November takes that diversion away whether you like it or not. The days shrink, the streets empty, and you end up in your room. Pascal would say this is not a punishment but an opportunity, maybe the only honest one we get.

He also draws a sharp line between mastery and surrender:

“But in pleasure, it is man who yields to pleasure. And only mastery and sovereignty bring glory, while slavery brings shame.”

Here Pascal and Nietzsche agree more than either would have liked. Both despised the person who is ruled by appetites and calls it freedom.

There is one more fragment in this vein that stung a little. Pascal imagines someone being offered the rewards of the world, and asks what they really amount to: some disappointments and “ten years of self-love,” spent “trying hard to please without succeeding.” I have read that sentence several times. It is a good question to ask about any ambition.

3. The Thinking Reed

If Pascal stopped at misery, he would just be a pessimist. What makes him great is the turn that follows:

“All our dignity consists, then, in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time, which we cannot fill. Let us endeavour, then, to think well; this is the principle of morality.”

We are tiny in a universe that could crush us without noticing. But the universe does not know it is crushing us, and we do. That awareness is our whole dignity. Notice the last step: thinking well is not an intellectual hobby. It is the foundation of ethics.

Then comes the fragment that holds his whole anthropology in two lines:

“Man is neither angel nor brute, and the unfortunate thing is that he who would act the angel acts the brute.”

We are a middle creature, and the danger lies at both ends. Try to be pure spirit and you end up worse than an animal. Forget that you are capable of more and you sink.

4. Between Despair and Pride

That middle position is the key to the long middle part of the Pensées, where Pascal turns to Christianity. You do not have to share his faith to see the structure of his argument. He believes that no doctrine fits the human being better than the one that teaches our double capacity, to receive grace and to lose it, because it warns us against our two great dangers:

“despair and pride.”

The philosophers, in his view, each saw only half. The Stoics knew our greatness and became proud. The skeptics knew our misery and fell into despair. For Pascal, the knowledge of Christ is “the middle point,” because in it we find both God and our own wretchedness. Without that balance, he writes, dignity leads to “terrible vanity,” and humiliation leads to “the deepest abjection.”

I underlined a passage about responsibility that works with or without theology. Whoever knows the will of their master will be judged more severely, because of the power that knowledge gives. Whoever is just will be asked for more. Whoever has received more will owe more. Responsibility grows in proportion to knowledge, justice and resources. It is an old idea, but Pascal states it with an accountant’s clarity.

And then there is this, perhaps the most moving line in the book:

“Jesus will be in agony even to the end of the world. We must not sleep during that time.”

Even for a non-believer, it is a powerful image of vigilance: the refusal to look away from suffering, the refusal to fall asleep while it continues. Pascal adds the Gospel line that explains why we fail: “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

5. Truth Must Be Loved Before It Can Be Known

The last group of notes is about truth, and these are the ones I think about most.

“Each errs the more dangerously, as each follows a truth. Their mistake is not in following a falsehood, but in not following another truth.”

This may be the most useful thing Pascal ever wrote for anyone who argues online. Most bitter disagreements are not between truth and lies. They are between two partial truths, each held so tightly that the other one becomes invisible. Heresy, for Pascal, is not believing something false. It is holding one truth and excluding the one that should balance it.

“Truth is so obscured nowadays, and lies so established, that unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.”

Truth does not simply present itself to a neutral observer. You have to want it, sometimes against your own interests. Knowing follows from loving. That also explains another of his hard sayings: there is no neutrality. If you are not with truth and justice, you are in fact against them.

And finally:

“Certainty comes only from truth; tranquility comes only from the sincere search for truth.”

This is where the book closes the circle it opened with the quiet room. We cannot sit still because we cannot face ourselves. The cure is not more diversion but sincerity: an honest search, carried out in exactly that room we were trying to escape.

Pascal and Nietzsche

It is tempting to treat these two as opposites, the believer and the man who announced the death of God. But reading them back to back, I mostly notice what they share. Both refuse comfortable illusions. Both think the human being is a problem, not a finished thing. Both treat solitude as the place where the truth starts to become visible.

They disagree about what you find once you get there. Nietzsche found the need to create values. Pascal found a God hidden enough to be missed by those who do not look for him and close enough to be found by those who do. I am not sure which of them was right. But I am grateful that both of them made me spend more time sitting quietly in my room.

Have you read the Pensées? Which fragment stayed with you?