The world is the house of the strong. I shall not know until the end what I have lost or won in this place, in this vast gambling den where I have spent more than sixty years, dice box in hand, shaking the dice.
Interpretation
Life is unpredictable and often resembles a gamble with uncertain outcomes.
In this quote, Denis Diderot reflects on the nature of life as a game of chance, where strength and resilience are essential to navigate the uncertainties. He emphasizes the idea that true understanding of one's gains and losses may only come with the passage of time, highlighting the complexities of existence and the human experience in a world filled with risks.
In practice
In a graduation speech to encourage students to embrace life's uncertainties.
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.
Temptation said that we all dream of committing crimes, but that only the unbalanced make that macabre idea a reality.
A tomb now suffices him for whom the whole world was not sufficient.
Density, complexity, and historical-semantic value that is so strong as to make politics possible... Gramsci's insight is to have recognised that subordination, fracturing, diffusion, reproducing, as much as producing, creating, forcing, guiding, are necessary aspects of elaboration.
At least I know I'm bewildered about the really fundamental and important facts of the universe.
Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead.
I have ventured to write more intimately about my personal life than is customary for a member of the Supreme Court, and with that candor comes a measure of vulnerability.
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