Daily Inspiration Quote by Blaise Pascal

Pascal diagnoses a crisis of orientation. When the center is lost, every peripheral thing masquerades as a center. He writes as a 17th-century Christian thinker steeped in Augustine, convinced that human nature was created for God and has been disordered by the Fall. If the soul’s proper form is communion with its maker, then losing that form does not leave a neutral emptiness; it creates a vacuum that fills with substitutes. Nature, for Pascal, is not mere biology but a teleology, a directedness. Remove the telos, and custom, fashion, and appetite rush in to define what we are.

That is why diversions fascinate him. In the Pensées he observes that people chase hunting, gambling, war, and chatter, not because these are truly good, but because they distract from the gnawing sense of lack. The heart seeks rest, and without the true good it cannot be still; everything becomes its good for a moment. Honor, power, pleasure, and even reason itself become absolutized, and so our loves are misordered. He calls this both our greatness and our wretchedness: greatness, because the scope of our desire hints at an infinite good; wretchedness, because we try to satisfy infinity with finites.

He also aims at the modern confidence in self-invention. If we deny a given nature, we think we are free; Pascal warns that we become pliable to whatever happens to be nearest: the tribe, the market, the moment. Habit then hardens contingency into essence, and we mistake what we have chosen or what has chosen us for what we are.

The line does not end in despair. If the loss is the problem, recovery is the remedy. Grace reorders love, reason finds its limits, and the heart’s vast capacity is matched with an adequate object. Until then, the world remains a hall of mirrors where every reflection offers itself as the real, and restlessness passes itself off as life.