Daily Inspiration Quote by Blaise Pascal

Pascal isn’t offering a cozy celebration of “different perspectives.” He’s indicting the human appetite for difference: we don’t merely land on opposing sides of an issue; we bring rival instruments of perception to it, and we secretly prefer the rivalry. “Different eyes” shifts the problem from geometry to anatomy. The conflict isn’t about where you stand, it’s about what you are - your habits, ego, interests, and the psychological need to feel right. By adding “we have no wish to find them alike,” he punctures the liberal fantasy that disagreement is just a misunderstanding waiting for better translation. Sometimes the misunderstanding is the point.

The line is classic Pascal: a moral psychologist in the era before psychology. Writing amid the religious and political turbulence of 17th-century France, and shaped by Jansenist rigor, he was obsessed with how self-love (amour-propre) distorts judgment. People don’t simply misread reality; they curate it to protect status, comfort, and identity. His phrasing is almost clinical, but the sting is ethical: the failure is volitional. We could seek common ground; we often choose not to, because sameness would dissolve the pleasures of superiority and the drama of faction.

What makes the sentence work is its quiet escalation. “Different sides” could be solved by movement. “Different eyes” can’t. Pascal compresses a whole theory of polarization into a single turn of phrase: disagreement as a feature, not a bug, of the self.