Painted portrait of Pascal with long brown hair, in a dark coat and white collar, against a warm umber ground

Portraits · Philosophers & essayists · VII of XII

Blaise Pascal

1623–1662 · Philosopher

The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.

Blaise Pascal · the sixteenth Provincial Letter, 1656
Read it in the source →

Blaise Pascal wrote this in December 1656, closing the sixteenth of his Provincial Letters, an anonymous attack on the moral teaching of the Jesuits. It is the true source of a line often credited to Mark Twain.

Lettres provinciales, Letter XVI (to the Jesuit Fathers), 4 December 1656, closing paragraph. The Provincial Letters of Blaise Pascal, tr. Thomas M'Crie (Edinburgh, 1847; 1856 printing), Project Gutenberg eBook #73959; French checked in Les Provinciales (Paris, 1851).

The originals

Oil portrait of Pascal with long brown hair and a broad white collar
The likenessANONYMOUS COPY AFTER FRANÇOIS QUESNEL · c. 1690Our portrait is painted after it.Public domain (17th-century painting, Château de Versailles). Posthumous: a copy after Quesnel's likeness; no life portrait is on Commons.
The title page of Les Provinciales, letters written by Louis de Montalte, 1657
The Provincial Letters, 1657His eighteen letters gathered in one volume in 1657, under the pen name Louis de Montalte. They had first appeared one by one, unsigned, in 1656–57.Les Provinciales ou les lettres écrites par Louis de Montalte (Cologne: Pierre de la Vallée, 1657), title page. Scan from Gallica (BnF), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.