Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory.
Interpretation
Pithy sentences effectively convey profound truths and help us remember important insights.
Denis Diderot's quote suggests that concise and impactful statements, much like sharp nails, drive significant truths into our minds. Such sentences have the power to capture complex ideas in a way that makes them memorable and relatable, thus serving as reminders of the wisdom they encapsulate.
In practice
In a motivational speech to inspire action, one could quote Diderot to emphasize the impact of concise messages.
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.
I get one hour, really 25 minutes in a sermon on a weekend, to combat all the hours of the week that people are told you are what you have through billboards, commercials, and sitcoms, and so forth.
Partial knowledge is more triumphant than complete knowledge; it takes things to be simpler than they are, and so makes its theory more popular and convincing.
But their intervention makes our acts to serve ever less merely the immediate claims of our instincts.
A different language is a different vision of life.
Practice radical humility." He (or she)who masters the art of humility cannot be humiliated.
Self pity is easily the most destructive of the non-pharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality.
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