"What is this world? A complex whole, subject to endless revolutions. All these revolutions show a continual tendency to destruction; a swift succession of beings who follow one another, press forward, and vanish; a fleeting symmetry; the order of a moment. I reproached you just now with estimating the perfection of things by your own capacity; and I might accuse you here of measuring its duration by the length of your own days. You judge of the continuous existence of the world, as an ephemeral insect might judge of yours. The world is eternal for you, as you are eternal to the being that lives but for one instant. Yet the insect is the more reasonable of the two. For what a prodigious succession of ephemeral generations attests your eternity! What an immeasurable tradition! Yet shall we all pass away, without the possibility of assigning either the real extension that we filled in space, or the precise time that we shall have endured. Time, matter, space—all, it may be, are no more than a point."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Denis Diderot, Lettre sur les aveugles [Letter on the Blind] (1749)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Insect
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Insect
66 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Insect →
Related Quotes
"When I behold what pleasure is Pursuit, What life, what glorious eagerness it is, Then mark how full Possession falls…"
"The mortal enemies of man are not his fellows of another continent or race; they are the aspects of the physical worl…"
"The individual human being, as such, does not—cannot—have any volition. ...the human being is not an autonomous entit…"
"Laws, as we read in ancient sages, Have been like cobwebs in all ages: Cobwebs for little flies are spread, And laws …"
"Oh, those scoundrelly Charity Commissioners! […] By the side of these anthropoid apes, the genuine bookworm, the pape…"
"Human beings suffer from a 'centralized mindset'; they would like to assign the coordination of activities to a centr…"
"The most amazing thing about social insect colonies is that there's no individual in charge. If you look at a single …"
"I don't know but you have spoken too highly of Gibbon's book; the Dean of Derry, who is our Club as well as Gibbon, t…"
"The same Being that fashioned the insect, whose existence is only discerned by a microscope, and gave that invisible …"
"Swarm Intelligence can be defined more precisely as: Any attempt to design algorithms or distributed problem-solving …"