Daily Inspiration Quote by Blaise Pascal

Admiration, for Pascal, is less a compliment than a confession: it’s what we do when our intelligence hits a wall and decides to decorate it. The line turns a seemingly noble emotion into a subtle self-indictment. You don’t “admire” what you’ve truly mastered; you evaluate it, use it, maybe even grow bored of it. Admiration is the glow that surrounds the opaque.

The intent is characteristically Pascalian: puncture human self-esteem while sounding almost courteous. In the 17th-century world of rising scientific certainty and salon sophistication, Pascal keeps insisting on the limits of reason and the vanity of our mental posturing. The subtext is a warning against mistaking awe for knowledge - and against the social prestige that comes from being impressed. Admiration can be a way of outsourcing judgment: if something is too complex, too holy, too elite, we treat our confusion as reverence. That’s not humility; it’s a convenient camouflage.

It also works because it’s a mirror held at an uncomfortable angle. Pascal doesn’t specify what “what” is: art, genius, God, power, charisma. The ambiguity lets the line travel. It can diagnose religious piety (reverence without comprehension), intellectual fashion (name-dropping without reading), and even romantic infatuation (idealization as a stand-in for knowing someone). The sting is that admiration feels like generosity, but Pascal frames it as our most elegant form of ignorance.