Pensées by Blaise Pascal (1670)

"The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me." The man who wrote that line had already built a calculating machine and worked out the mathematics of chance. Then a single night in November 1654 converted him absolutely, and he sewed the record of it onto a scrap of paper hidden in the lining of his coat, found only after he died. _Pensées_ is the rubble of the defense of Christianity he never lived to finish, gathered from scattered notes by editors who could not agree on their order. That disorder is the argument. Here is the keenest mind of its century turning its instruments on faith and reaching the exact place where the instruments give out: why a person must wager on God, why we fill every waking hour with noise out of terror rather than pleasure, why the heart keeps reasons that reason will never know. The book never arrives at its conclusion, because its conclusion was always that, by reason alone, no one arrives.