Pascal: The Greatness and Littleness of Man, A Thinking Reed

Excerpt from Thoughts(Pensées), Blaise Pascal, c.1662(published later, posthumously)

The greatness of man consists in thought.

A thinking reed. — Not from space must I seek my dignity,
but from the ruling of my thought. I should have no more if I
possessed whole worlds. By space the Universe encompasses
and swallows me as an atom, by thought I encompass it.

Man is but a reed, weakest in nature, but a reed which thinks.
It needs not that the whole Universe should arm to crush him.
A vapour, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But were the
Universe to crush him, man would still be more noble than that
which has slain him, because he knows that he dies, and that
the Universe has the better of him. The Universe knows nothing
of this.

All our dignity therefore consists in thought. By this must we
raise ourselves, not by space or duration which we cannot fill.
Then let us make it our study to think well, for this is the
starting-point of morals.