"love and reason are but one and the same thing"

     "Love gives [way] to [(donne de)] the mind and is sustained by the mind.  Address is necessary in order to love. . . .

     "Some have on purpose [(à propos)] wrongly deprived the term reason of love and opposed them unjustifiably, for love and reason are but one [and the] same thing:  [love] is a rush [(precipitation)] of thoughts entertained one-sidedly [(qui se porte d’un costé)] without a proper examination of [(sans bien examiner) the] whole, but it is always a reason. . . .  Let us therefore not exclude reason from love, because it is inseparable from it."

     "L’amour donne de l’esprit, et il se soustient par l’esprit.  Il faut de l’addresse pour aymer. . . .
     "L’on a osté mal à propos le nom de raison à l’amour, et on les a opposez sans un bon fondement, car l’amour et la raison n’est qu’une mesme chose.  C’est une precipitation de pensées qui se porte d’un costé sans bien examiner tout, mais c’est tousjours une raison. . . . N’excluons donc point la raison de l’amour, puisqu’elle en est inseparable."

     Discours sur les passions de l’amour, Œuvres de Blaise Pascal, ed. Brunschvieg, Boutroux, and Gasier, tom. 3, ed. Brunschvieg and Boutroux (1908), 127, 136.  Reading alternative to "l'amour et la raison n’est qu'une mesme chose":  "l'amour et la raison n'est que la mesme chose".  Trans. Wright:

     Love gives intellect and is sustained by intellect.  Address is needed in order to love. . . .
     We have unaptly taken away the name of reason from love and have opposed them to each other without good foundation, for love and reason are but the same thing.  It is a precipitation of thought which is impelled to a side before examining every thing, but it is still a reason, and we should not and cannot wish that it were otherwise, for we would then be very disagreeable machines.  Let us not therefore exclude reason from love, since they are inseparable.  The poets were not right in painting Love blind; we must take off his bandage and restore him henceforth the enjoyment of his eyes.

But Pascal's authorship has been definitively disproven.  See, for example, p. 1209 of vol. 2 of the most recent Pléiade edition of the Œuvres complètes (Paris:  Gallimard, 2000), which reprints it in an appendix, but for historical reasons (of the past century or so) alone, and suggests, as potential imitators who would have had the requisite exposure to La Rouchefoucauld and Malebranche as well, Charles-Paul d'Escoubleau (Lafuma) and, somewhat more persuasively, Henri-Louis de Loménie de Brienne (Mesnard).