Daily Inspiration Quote by Blaise Pascal

A “natural style” is Pascal’s quiet flex against the literary peacocks of his century: the writers who make you feel the machinery of writing. In a France obsessed with rhetoric, salons, and cultivated performance, “author” isn’t a compliment so much as a mask. It signals someone arranging effects, curating a persona, trying to be admired for technique. Pascal’s sting is that this kind of authorship interposes itself between speaker and reader, turning communication into display.

The line works because of its little plot twist: we arrive braced for artifice and meet a human being. “Astonished and charmed” captures the double reaction. First, surprise that language can feel unforced in a culture that prizes polish; then pleasure at recognizing a living mind rather than a crafted façade. “We find a person” is the key move: authenticity isn’t just moral here, it’s aesthetic. Naturalness becomes a style effect that produces intimacy, a sense of direct contact.

The subtext is also Pascal’s deeper project: stripping away self-deception. In his thinking, humans are virtuosos of distraction, and rhetoric can be another diversion from truth. A natural voice punctures that. It doesn’t mean unedited babble; it means prose that hides its scaffolding so the reader meets conviction, vulnerability, intelligence - not performance. Pascal is defending a kind of writing that refuses to audition for immortality and instead risks being encountered as a finite, accountable self.