Daily Inspiration Quote by Blaise Pascal

The line compresses a hard truth about human nature and moral life: wrongdoing tends to be effortless and endlessly inventive, while goodness is narrow, demanding, and precise. Pascal, writing in the Pensées with a Jansenist awareness of original sin, sees people as pulled between greatness and wretchedness, capable of high reason yet constantly bent by self-love and diversion. If the will is misaligned, it does not need instruction to go wrong; it simply follows the path of least resistance.

There is an older philosophical echo here. Aristotle taught that virtue is a mean, a balanced point; there are countless ways to miss the mark, but only one way to hit the center. Medieval thinkers added that evil is a privation, a lack of proper order or fullness. Because there are innumerable things that can be missing, corruption can take seemingly infinite shapes: cruelty and cowardice, vanity and despair, fanaticism and sloth, each wearing different masks in different eras. Goodness, by contrast, is difficult because it requires integration of reason, desire, and action, and often grace in Pascal’s theological vision. It asks for attention, training, and self-surrender; it resists entropy.

Calling evil easy does not trivialize its harm. It underscores how quickly it spreads when people grow careless, how readily excuses supply themselves, how institutions, technologies, and habits magnify small compromises into large injustices. It also explains why sheer cleverness does not secure virtue; intelligence can just as readily multiply rationalizations. The line is therefore practical counsel: do not be surprised by the creative agility of vice, nor by the hard work of the good. The task is to cultivate the few sturdy habits that hold many disordered possibilities at bay, and to remember that what is simple is not always easy, and what is easy is rarely good.