Love Quote by Blaise Pascal

Pascal doesn’t flatter his reader with the Enlightenment fantasy that truth is just waiting to be discovered by any competent mind. He treats it as something that can be missed on purpose. The line pivots on a bleak diagnosis: when a culture normalizes lies long enough, “falsehood” stops feeling like an intrusion and starts feeling like furniture. At that point, evidence alone can’t do the work, because what’s broken isn’t the information supply but the appetite for reality.

The needle Pascal threads is deliberate. “Obscure” suggests not merely hidden truth but truth made hard to see by noise, habit, self-interest, and social reward. “Established” makes falsehood institutional: it’s the story everyone repeats, the safe script, the version of events that lets people keep their jobs, maintain their status, or avoid existential discomfort. In that world, “know it” becomes less a cognitive achievement than a moral one.

“Unless we love the truth” is the provocation. Pascal smuggles in a claim that modern ears resist: objectivity is partly a matter of character. Loving truth means wanting it even when it embarrasses you, costs you, or dismantles your comforting explanations. It’s a rebuke to cleverness without integrity, to skepticism that performs sophistication while ducking commitment.

Context matters: Pascal writes amid religious conflict, rising rationalism, and the early modern churn of propaganda, polemic, and authority. The sentence reads like a warning from inside a society discovering that persuasion scales faster than wisdom. He’s not just describing epistemology; he’s diagnosing a spiritual and political vulnerability: when lies are socially rewarded, only desire strong enough to withstand those rewards can keep you honest.