Daily Inspiration Quote by Blaise Pascal

Pascal draws a moral map with a trapdoor in the middle: the categories aren’t “good people” and “bad people,” but the self-aware and the self-deceived. The line works because it flips what most moral talk wants to do - reassure the listener that righteousness is recognizable, stable, and usually located in the person doing the judging. Pascal, steeped in Augustinian Christianity and the Jansenist suspicion of human vanity, isn’t offering a taxonomy so much as a diagnostic for spiritual pride.

The “righteous who think they are sinners” are not performing humility as a social pose; they’re the ones whose conscience is awake. In Pascal’s world, clarity about one’s fallibility is the closest thing to moral health. The “sinners who think they are righteous” are the genuinely dangerous type: people whose confidence has laundered their appetite into virtue. He’s aiming at the respectable sinner - the person insulated by status, ritual, and public approval, mistaking moral comfort for moral truth.

Subtextually, it’s an argument about epistemology as much as ethics: the hardest thing isn’t doing right, it’s knowing yourself. That’s why the sentence is built on perception (“think they are”) rather than behavior. Pascal’s century was thick with religious conflict and competing claims to authority; certainty was everywhere. His jab is that certainty can be a symptom, not a proof, of righteousness.

The sting is democratic. Everyone is implicated, especially the people most sure they aren’t.