"A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us"
About this Quote
Pascal lands the knife with the word "trifle": not just something small, but something embarrassingly small. The line is a dare to human self-respect. We like to imagine our joys and griefs as proportionate to grand causes, yet the mind tilts on petty hinges. A missed compliment, a stray look, a minor inconvenience can sour an entire day; a sweet pastry, a joke, a tiny windfall can patch over dread. The symmetry of the sentence is the point: the same mechanism that makes us fragile also makes us easily soothed. It is not a flattering anthropology.
The subtext is classic Pascalian suspicion of "divertissement", the distractions we chase to avoid staring directly at mortality, God, and our own incoherence. Trifles are not accidental; they're the mind's preferred currency because they're manageable. Big truths demand reckoning. Small stimuli let us feel in control while quietly confirming how little control we have. The line also contains a moral sting: if we can be consoled by a trifle, maybe our suffering wasn't as noble as we claimed. If we can be distressed by a trifle, maybe our composure was always a performance.
Context matters: Pascal writes in a 17th-century world where religious certainty and scientific discovery collide, and the self is being newly examined. His genius is to make psychology sound like theology and vice versa. He reduces human dignity to a hair-trigger sensitivity - then implies that salvation, if it exists, cannot be built on the sturdiness of our moods.
The subtext is classic Pascalian suspicion of "divertissement", the distractions we chase to avoid staring directly at mortality, God, and our own incoherence. Trifles are not accidental; they're the mind's preferred currency because they're manageable. Big truths demand reckoning. Small stimuli let us feel in control while quietly confirming how little control we have. The line also contains a moral sting: if we can be consoled by a trifle, maybe our suffering wasn't as noble as we claimed. If we can be distressed by a trifle, maybe our composure was always a performance.
Context matters: Pascal writes in a 17th-century world where religious certainty and scientific discovery collide, and the self is being newly examined. His genius is to make psychology sound like theology and vice versa. He reduces human dignity to a hair-trigger sensitivity - then implies that salvation, if it exists, cannot be built on the sturdiness of our moods.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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