"Too much and too little wine. Give him none, he cannot find truth; give him too much, the same"
About this Quote
Pascal’s line has the snap of a moral epigram and the chill of a laboratory note: truth is not merely hidden by vice, it’s also distorted by excess of the very thing that seems to open us up. Wine here isn’t a quaint prop; it’s a pressure test for the Enlightenment’s favorite fantasy that the mind is a steady instrument. Pascal, a mathematician-philosopher with a convert’s sense of human fragility, treats reason as contingent hardware: alter the body, and the “truth” you get back is corrupted output.
The craft is in the symmetry. “None” and “too much” land as twin failures, exposing a deeper target than temperance. He’s puncturing the idea that there’s a clean pipeline from perception to certainty. Sober deprivation can be its own delirium: rigidity, anxiety, spiritual scruple, the kind of clenched consciousness that mistakes control for clarity. Drunkenness, on the other hand, doesn’t just blur; it manufactures counterfeit revelations with the confidence of a prophet.
Context matters: Pascal is writing in a Christian Europe wrestling with skepticism, scientific method, and the limits of rational proof. His larger project is to show that humans are suspended between grandeur and misery, capable of geometry yet governed by appetite, habit, and mood. The subtext is theological and psychological at once: if truth depends on our dosage of comfort, stimulation, or pleasure, then “pure reason” is a myth, and humility becomes not a virtue but a necessity.
The craft is in the symmetry. “None” and “too much” land as twin failures, exposing a deeper target than temperance. He’s puncturing the idea that there’s a clean pipeline from perception to certainty. Sober deprivation can be its own delirium: rigidity, anxiety, spiritual scruple, the kind of clenched consciousness that mistakes control for clarity. Drunkenness, on the other hand, doesn’t just blur; it manufactures counterfeit revelations with the confidence of a prophet.
Context matters: Pascal is writing in a Christian Europe wrestling with skepticism, scientific method, and the limits of rational proof. His larger project is to show that humans are suspended between grandeur and misery, capable of geometry yet governed by appetite, habit, and mood. The subtext is theological and psychological at once: if truth depends on our dosage of comfort, stimulation, or pleasure, then “pure reason” is a myth, and humility becomes not a virtue but a necessity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
|---|
More Quotes by Blaise
Add to List
