Aging & Wisdom Quote by Denis Diderot

A life staged as a choreography of errors: we rush into what we want without seeing it, then spend years standing still in the name of prudence, then finally move again only after the thing has slipped behind us. Diderot compresses an entire Enlightenment argument into a bleak little pantomime. He is not romanticizing innocence; he is mocking it. The infant is pure appetite, propelled by instinct, eyes closed like a miniature philosopher-killer: desire arrives before understanding. The adult, supposedly the rational apex, doesn t stride forward at all. He freezes. That stillness reads as social discipline masquerading as maturity: career, reputation, property, the fear of looking foolish. Reason becomes an excuse to delay living.

Then the cruelest turn: the old man "approaches it with his back turned". Age brings motion back, but it is motion oriented toward the past. You move closer to the object (death, truth, happiness, meaning - Diderot keeps it deliberately undefined) while refusing to face it. The back turned suggests denial, nostalgia, or the asymmetry of time: you can only understand life in retrospect, yet you cannot re-enter it.

As an editor and encyclopedist, Diderot was obsessed with how humans misread their own condition, how institutions train us to confuse caution with wisdom. The line works because it indicts every stage at once. It offers no heroic arc, just the comedy of self-deception: youth blind, adulthood immobilized, old age advancing in reverse, like progress itself when it forgets to look where it s going.