Daily Inspiration Quote by Blaise Pascal

Pascal’s line slices with the calm severity of someone who thinks the most dangerous arrogance is the casual kind. “Men blaspheme what they do not know” isn’t just a complaint about impiety; it’s a diagnosis of a habit: we attack what resists our categories, then treat that attack as proof we were right. The verb “blaspheme” does strategic work here. It frames ignorance not as an innocent gap in knowledge, but as an active posture that turns confusion into contempt. You don’t merely misunderstand the sacred or the complex; you profane it to regain control.

The subtext is pointedly Augustinian: human pride can’t tolerate limits. Pascal, writing in a 17th-century France where new science, religious controversy, and political power were tightly braided, is wary of the era’s swaggering rationalism as much as he is of shallow piety. His broader project in the Pensees is to argue that reason is real but insufficient; it has a perimeter, and the modern mind keeps pretending it doesn’t. When people hit that perimeter, they lash out.

There’s also a social critique hiding in the grammar. “Men,” plural and general, suggests a collective reflex, not an individual failing. Ignorance becomes a cultural performance: mock what you can’t parse, dismiss what you can’t master, call mystery “superstition” and move on. Pascal’s sting is that blasphemy often isn’t rebellion against God. It’s impatience with our own intellectual humility.