PENSE

(French literally, "thought") a thought expressed in literary form. A pense can be short and in a specific form, such as an aphorism or epigram, or it can be as long as a paragraph or a page. The term originated with French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, whose Penses (1670) was a collection of some 800 to 1,000 notes and manuscript fragments expressing his religious beliefs. The form was particularly popular in French literature, as in Denis Diderot's Penses philosophiques (1746).