Did Blaise Pascal say "The heart has its reasons which reason knows not"?

Q: Did Blaise Pascal say "The heart has its reasons which reason knows not"?

Yes. The line is authentically Pascal's: it appears in the Pensées, the fragmentary defence of Christianity he was drafting from about 1658 until his death in 1662, published posthumously in 1670. The French reads "Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point" — fragment 277 in Brunschvicg's numbering. The catch is the English: no standard published translation reads "which reason knows not." W. F. Trotter's 1910 Harvard Classics text renders it "The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know."

Who really said it

The heart has its reasons which reason knows not

Written by Blaise Pascal 1623–1662 · French mathematician, physicist & religious philosopher

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The line is authentically Pascal’s: it appears in the Pensées, the fragmentary defence of Christianity he was drafting from about 1658 until his death in 1662, published posthumously in 1670. The French reads “Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point” — fragment 277 in Brunschvicg’s numbering. The catch is the English: no standard published translation reads “which reason knows not.” W. F. Trotter’s 1910 Harvard Classics text renders it “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.”

Last verified 15 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“The heart has its reasons which reason knows not” Blaise Pascal, Pensées, fr. 277 — popular English rendering; W. F. Trotter's translation (1904; Harvard Classics, 1910) reads "The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know."

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Provenance

The source

Work: Pensées
Written: c. 1658–1662; first published 1670 (posthumous, Port-Royal edition)
Fragment: No. 277 (Brunschvicg) · Lafuma 423 · Sellier 680 — Section IV, “Of the Means of Belief”
Translation: W. F. Trotter, first published 1904 (J. M. Dent) and set from Brunschvicg’s text; quoted here from the reprint in Blaise Pascal, The Harvard Classics vol. 48 (P. F. Collier & Son, 1910)

The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things. I say that the heart naturally loves the Universal Being, and also itself naturally, according as it gives itself to them; and it hardens itself against one or the other at its will. … It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason. This, then, is faith: God felt by the heart, not by the reason. Pensées, frr. 277–278 (trans. Trotter, 1904; Harvard Classics, 1910)

Fragment 278 follows immediately in the same section and shows what Pascal meant by “the heart” — the faculty by which God is apprehended, not sentiment as against intellect.

Read fragment 277 in Trotter's translation on Wikisource

How we verified this

The French original is fragment 277 in Léon Brunschvicg’s numbering, and Lafuma 423 / Sellier 680 in the modern editions — it belongs to the Preuves par discours group, per French Wikipedia’s article on the phrase ↗.
The scholarly French edition site Pensées de Blaise Pascal records the sentence as “Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point ; on le sait en mille choses,” filed under Preuves par discours at Sellier 680 ↗.
In English, the line is printed at fragment 277 under the running head “Of the Means of Belief” in the 1910 Harvard Classics volume — see the page scan ↗, which reads “which reason does not know,” not “knows not.”
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy dates the composition of the Pensées to spring 1658 onward, unfinished at Pascal’s death in August 1662, with the first Port-Royal edition in 1670 ↗.

Public domain

Both layers are clear. Pascal’s French was first published in 1670 and has been in the public domain for centuries. The English shown here is W. F. Trotter’s translation, published in The Harvard Classics in 1910 ↗ — comfortably before the 1931 US copyright threshold — which is why it is freely hosted on Wikisource. Note that modern renderings such as A. J. Krailsheimer’s Penguin translation are separately in copyright.

This reflects the original work, which is public domain. If your exact English wording comes from a specific modern translation, that translation may itself still be under copyright — check the edition you quote.

Fact-check

What gets garbled

Pascal really did write this, so the usual quote-site problem — wrong author — does not apply. What goes wrong here is subtler: the words get compressed, and the meaning gets moved from the chapel to the bedroom.

“which reason knows not” compressed

No published translation located here uses this exact phrasing. Trotter’s 1910 Harvard Classics text reads “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know ↗.” Wikiquote lists a further variant, “of which reason knows nothing,” and notes the line is commonly cited as “which reason knows not of” ↗. The popular form is a tightening of a real sentence, not an invention.

Read as a defence of romantic feeling over logic misread

T. S. Eliot, introducing the Pensées, wrote of the phrase: “how often one has heard that quoted, and quoted often to the wrong purpose! For this is by no means an exaltation of the ‘heart’ over the ‘head,’ a defence of unreason” — see his introduction ↗. French Wikipedia reports the philosopher Hervé Pasqua’s view that the common romantic usage is a contresens.

277 or 423 or 680? editions

All three are correct, for different editors. Brunschvicg numbered it 277; Lafuma 423; Sellier 680 — though Sellier 680 is a whole liasse spanning Lafuma 418–426, not a one-for-one match for Brunschvicg’s single fragment. Citations that give a bare number without naming the edition are the reason the same sentence appears to live in three places at once — see the fragment references ↗.

Pascal wrote it, and he was talking about God. The next line but one tells you so: “It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason” — Pensées, fr. 278 ↗.

Context

Why it mattered

Pascal spent his twenties proving things. He built a calculating machine, worked out the mathematics of chance with Fermat, and demonstrated that air has weight. Then he spent his thirties arguing that the most important thing a person can know cannot be proved at all — and this sentence is the hinge of that argument.

The “heart” here is not sentiment. In Pascal’s vocabulary the cœur is a genuine faculty of knowledge, one that grasps first principles directly rather than deriving them — and, he claimed, grasps God the same way. The sentence is not saying feelings beat logic. It is saying that reason has a boundary, and that something else is doing real cognitive work on the far side of it. Coming from one of the century’s great geometers, that was not a shrug. It was a considered result.

It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason.

Read the full story

The Pensées were never a book. They are the surviving scraps of an apology for Christianity that Pascal began around 1658 and was still assembling when he died in August 1662, some of them found sewn into bundles, some loose. Every edition since has had to decide what order to put them in — which is why the same fragment carries a different number depending on whether you are holding Brunschvicg, Lafuma, or Sellier.

The irony of the line’s afterlife is that it now does exactly the work Pascal was warning against. Lifted from Section IV, “Of the Means of Belief,” and set loose on greeting cards, it has become a licence for whatever the speaker already wanted to do. Eliot noticed this in 1931 and was audibly annoyed about it.

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Pensées, Section IV (Trotter translation)en.wikisource.org

The full public-domain English text of fragments 277 and 278 in W. F. Trotter's 1910 Harvard Classics translation.

Page scan: fragment 277 as printed, 1910en.wikisource.org

The scanned Harvard Classics page under the header "Of the Means of Belief" — the printed wording is "which reason does not know."

Wikiquote: Penséesen.wikiquote.org

Sourced entry giving the French original, fragment 277, and the competing English variants including "of which reason knows nothing."

Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pointfr.wikipedia.org

A short article on this one sentence: its notes give the fragment references (Laf. 423, Sel. 680; Brunschvicg 277 and 278), and it reports Hervé Pasqua's view that the romantic reading is a contresens.

Pensées de Blaise Pascal (scholarly French edition)penseesdepascal.fr

French critical-edition site recording the fragment under Preuves par discours at Sellier 680.

Pascal, Blaise — Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophyiep.utm.edu

Scholarly overview of Pascal's doctrine of the cœur and the composition and publication history of the Pensées.

Pascal's Pensées with T. S. Eliot's introductiongutenberg.org

Eliot's introduction, which singles out this phrase as the one most often "quoted to the wrong purpose."

The author

Who was Blaise Pascal?

Blaise Pascal

1623–1662 · French mathematician, physicist & religious philosopher

Pascal was a prodigy who built a working mechanical calculator at nineteen, co-founded probability theory in a correspondence with Fermat, and did foundational work on fluid pressure — the SI unit of pressure carries his name. After a night of intense religious experience in November 1654 he turned largely from mathematics to faith, aligning himself with the Jansenists of Port-Royal. The Pensées are the unfinished notes for a Christian apologetic he began around 1658 and never lived to assemble; he died in 1662 at thirty-nine, and the fragments were published by others eight years later.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Pascal, Blaise. “Section IV: Of the Means of Belief,” fr. 277. In Pensées, translated by W. F. Trotter (translation first published 1904). Blaise Pascal, The Harvard Classics, vol. 48. New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1910. Originally published in French, Paris, 1670.

MLA (9th ed.)

Pascal, Blaise. “Section IV: Of the Means of Belief.” Pensées, translated by W. F. Trotter, Blaise Pascal, The Harvard Classics, vol. 48, P. F. Collier & Son, 1910, fr. 277.

APA (7th ed.)

Pascal, B. (1910). Pensées (W. F. Trotter, Trans.). In Blaise Pascal (The Harvard Classics, Vol. 48). P. F. Collier & Son. (Original work published 1670)

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