QUOTE_AUTHENTICITY — fake/floating quote policy (Pascal)
Pascal is heavily meme-quoted (the Wager reduced to "believe because it pays";
"the heart has its reasons" turned into anti-intellectual slogan; apocryphal
lines like the "God-shaped vacuum", which he never wrote in those words). This
page is the предохранитель.
Statuses
verified_primary— verbatim (whitespace/punctuation-normalized) in an
ingested Brunschvicg unit of the Trotter EN layer; carriesunit_id. For the
famous formulas the FR original is also matched.verified_secondary_only— attested in Pascal scholarship or other works
(Provincial Letters, correspondence) but not in the ingested Pensées core.popular_but_unverified— circulates widely, no edition trace found.misattributed— verifiably not Pascal, or not in those words.
Verification rule
The evidence layer is Trotter EN (PD, Gutenberg #18269), quoted verbatim as a
literal substring of the cited pensees.<N> unit. Blockquotes are exact
substrings; inline «…» fragments are exact after whitespace normalization (the
Trotter source is hard-wrapped, so a quote spanning a line break is normalized
before matching). For the celebrated lines the FR Brunschvicg original is the
arbiter and is quoted alongside. RU renderings are «перевод наш» and are
never treated as evidence — they are reading aids from FR, cross-checked vs
Trotter. RAG-time rule: a popular-quote-shaped query with no corpus match answers
NO_RELEVANT_KB_EVIDENCE, never confirms.
Starter list (extend as encountered)
| Quote (common form) | Status | Note |
|---|---|---|
| «Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point» | verified_primary |
Pensées 277; FR arbiter confirmed. Meme-flattened into "feelings over logic" — see serdtse-i-razum for the real (first-principles) sense |
| «Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie» | verified_primary |
Pensées 206; FR arbiter confirmed |
| «L'homme n'est qu'un roseau… mais c'est un roseau pensant» | verified_primary |
Pensées 347; FR arbiter confirmed |
| The Wager = "believe because it's a good bet" | misattributed (as final thesis) |
Caricature. 233 ends in action/habit + grace, not payoff maximization; see pari |
| «Dieu est ou il n'est pas… vous êtes embarqué» | verified_primary |
Pensées 233; FR arbiter confirmed |
| "God-shaped vacuum / hole in every heart" | popular_but_unverified / likely misattributed |
Modern paraphrase of Pensées 425 (paraphrase, not verbatim: the fragment speaks of an "infinite abyss" that only God can fill — outside the v1 ingested set); not those words; reject verbatim attribution |
| "In faith there is enough light for those who wish to believe…" | verified_secondary_only |
Pensées 430 Lafuma / near 149 — outside the v1 ingested set; do not attribute to a v1 unit |
| Motivational Pascal quote-collections | popular_but_unverified |
reject by default |
KB build verification (2026-07-07, Pensées hand-built KB)
- All evidence blockquotes in
concepts/,principles/,chains/verified as
verbatim (whitespace-normalized) substrings of their citedpensees.<N>unit
in the Trotter EN layer. Inline «…» fragments audited the same way. - The three FR arbiter lines (206, 277, 347) and the two Wager FR lines (233)
verified against the Brunschvicg original. - The Wager is represented by its actual structure (undecidable by reason →
forced choice → expectation under infinite gain → entry via action/habit +
grace), not as the "believe-because-it-pays" caricature — flagged at
pari and here. - Interlocutor speech in 233 («The true course is not to wager at all») is
marked as the imagined objector at both use sites, never as Pascal's thesis. - Latin Scripture tags inside fragments (
Vere tu es Deus absconditus) are
attributed to their fragment, not presented as Pascal's coinage.