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Full Idea
Imagination decides everything: it creates beauty, justice and happiness, which is the world's supreme good.
Gist of Idea
Imagination creates beauty, justice and happiness, which is the supreme good
Source
Blaise Pascal (Pensées [1662], 44 (82))
Book Ref
Pascal,Blaise: 'Pensées', ed/tr. Krailsheimer,A.J. [Penguin 1966], p.41
A Reaction
Compare Fogelin's remark in Idea 6555. I see Pascal's point, but these ideals are also responses to facts about the world, such as human potential and human desire and successful natural functions.
Related Idea
Idea 6555 We are also irrational, with a unique ability to believe in bizarre self-created fictions [Fogelin]
| 6677 | Imagination creates beauty, justice and happiness, which is the supreme good [Pascal] |
| 6678 | We live for the past or future, and so are never happy in the present [Pascal] |
| 6679 | It is not good to be too free [Pascal] |
| 6680 | It is a funny sort of justice whose limits are marked by a river [Pascal] |
| 6681 | We only want to know things so that we can talk about them [Pascal] |
| 6682 | Majority opinion is visible and authoritative, although not very clever [Pascal] |
| 22011 | The first principles of truth are not rational, but are known by the heart [Pascal] |
| 6676 | Painting makes us admire things of which we do not admire the originals [Pascal] |
| 7455 | Pascal knows you can't force belief, but you can make it much more probable [Pascal, by Hacking] |
| 7457 | Pascal is right, but relies on the unsupported claim of a half as the chance of God's existence [Hacking on Pascal] |
| 7456 | The libertine would lose a life of enjoyable sin if he chose the cloisters [Hacking on Pascal] |
| 6684 | If you win the wager on God's existence you win everything, if you lose you lose nothing [Pascal] |
| 6675 | The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing [Pascal] |
| 20732 | If man considers himself as lost and imprisoned in the universe, he will be terrified [Pascal] |