Daily Inspiration Quote by Denis Diderot

Diderot turns the Enlightenment’s proud machine metaphors into something intimate: not clocks, but instruments. The point isn’t to reduce humans to mechanism; it’s to describe how porous we are. “Endowed with feeling and memory” smuggles in a provocation: sensation doesn’t merely register the world, it accumulates. Memory is the resonance chamber that makes today’s stimulus ring with yesterday’s experience. That’s why the image works - it’s physics repurposed as psychology.

The sly move is in the second sentence. Our senses are “strings” struck by “surrounding objects,” a tidy bit of empiricism: the world plays us. Then Diderot adds the unsettling coda: the strings “frequently strike themselves.” He’s pointing at internal causation - imagination, association, desire, trauma - the way the mind can generate sensations, arguments, even convictions without any fresh input. The body becomes both instrument and musician, a self-exciting system. That’s the subtext: if experience is partly self-percussive, certainty is always suspect.

Context matters. Diderot, the great editor of the Encyclopedie, lived in a culture where knowledge was being reorganized into systems, categories, mechanisms. He’s borrowing that explanatory ambition while warning against its arrogance. Humans are not blank slates serenely recording reality; they’re vibrating, temperamental devices. The metaphor flatters science with its precision, then undercuts it by insisting on feedback loops - the mind’s habit of mistaking its own echoes for the world.