We swallow with one gulp the lie that flatters us, and drink drop by drop the truth which is bitter to us.
Interpretation
People often accept comforting lies easily, while they struggle to confront uncomfortable truths.
This quote highlights the tendency of human beings to embrace flattering lies over difficult truths. Diderot suggests that while we quickly accept what makes us feel good, we approach reality cautiously and reluctantly, often savoring the bitter taste of truthβa reminder of the complexities of our understanding and acceptance of reality.
In practice
In a motivational speech about facing reality, remind your audience of Diderot's insight.
The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid.
This root [the potato], no matter how much you prepare it, is tasteless and floury. It cannot pass for an agreeable food, but it supplies a food sufficiently abundant and sufficiently healthy for men who ask only to sustain themselves. The potato is criticized with reason for being windy, but what matters windiness for the vigorous organisms of peasants and laborers?
Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world.
There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge... observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.
In order to get as much fame as one's father one has to much more able than he.
All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs.
Let go. Why do you cling to pain? There is nothing you can do about the wrongs of yesterday. It is not yours to judge. Why hold on to the very thing which keeps you from hope and love?
I was tired of seeing the Graces always depicted as beautiful young things. I think wisdom comes with age and life and pain. And knowing what matters.
It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.
Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.
A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.
A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a master in that science when he has learned that... he is going to be a beginner all his life.
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