Denis Diderot quotes:

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  • 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.

  • Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

  • When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man's name live for thousands of years.

  • There is no kind of harassment that a man may not inflict on a woman with impunity in civilized societies.

  • The possibility of divorce renders both marriage partners stricter in their observance of the duties they owe to each other. Divorces help to improve morals and to increase the population.

  • Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory.

  • When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.

  • Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

  • Only passions, great passions can elevate the soul to great things.

  • We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.

  • To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly. What a noble aim is that of the zealot who tortures himself like a madman in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing, and who, if he succeeded, would end up a complete monster!

  • Only a very bad theologian would confuse the certainty that follows revelation with the truths that are revealed. They are entirely different things.

  • It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley, but to believe or not believe in God is not important at all.

  • Every man has his dignity. I'm willing to forget mine, but at my own discretion and not when someone else tells me to.

  • Although a man may wear fine clothing, if he lives peacefully; and is good, self-possessed, has faith and is pure; and if he does not hurt any living being, he is a holy man.

  • The God of the Christians is a father who makes much of his apples, and very little of his children.

  • The blood of Jesus Christ can cover a multitude of sins, it seems to me.

  • Power acquired by violence is only a usurpation, and lasts only as long as the force of him who commands prevails over that of those who obey.

  • The infant runs toward it with its eyes closed, the adult is stationary, the old man approaches it with his back turned.

  • All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs.

  • Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.

  • Watch out for the fellow who talks about putting things in order! Putting things in order always means getting other people under your control.

  • Justice is the first virtue of those who command, and stops the complaints of those who obey.

  • Good music is very close to primitive language.

  • No man has received from nature the right to command his fellow human beings.

  • Bad company is as instructive as licentiousness. One makes up for the loss of one's innocence with the loss of one's prejudices.

  • Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.

  • The decisions of law courts should never be printed: in the long run, they form a counter authority to the law.

  • People praise virtue, but they hate it, they run away from it. It freezes you to death, and in this world you've got to keep your feet warm.

  • Evil always turns up in this world through some genius or other.

  • The best mannered people make the most absurd lovers.

  • If a misplaced admiration shows imbecility, an affected criticism shows vice of character. Expose thyself rather to appear a beast than false.

  • From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.

  • A nation which thinks that it is belief in God and not good law which makes people honest does not seem to me very advanced.

  • If reason be a gift of Heaven, and we can say as much of faith, Heaven has certainly made us two gifts not only incompatible, but in direct contradiction to each other. In order to solve the difficulty, we are compelled to say either that faith is a chimera or that reason is useless.

  • 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.

  • One must be oneself very little of a philosopher not to feel that the finest privilege of our reason consists in not believing in anything by the impulsion of a blind and mechanical instinct, and that it is to dishonour reason to put it in bonds as the Chaldeans did. Man is born to think for himself.

  • Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs.

  • The best doctor is the one you run to and can't find.

  • Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it.

  • Only God and some few rare geniuses can keep forging ahead into novelty.

  • Oh! how near are genius and madness! Men imprison them and chain them, or raise statues to them.

  • Only passions, and great passions, can raise the soul to great things. Without them there is no sublimity, either in morals or in creativity. Art returns to infancy, and virtue becomes small- minded.

  • Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: 'My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.' This stranger is a theologian.

  • I have only a small flickering light to guide me in the darkness of a thick forest. Up comes a theologian and blows it out.

  • His hands would plait the priest's guts, if he had no rope, to strangle kings.

  • There is only one passion, the passion for happiness.

  • There is no good father who would want to resemble our Heavenly Father.

  • It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it.

  • Isn't it better to have men being ungrateful than to miss a chance to do good?

  • In order to shake a hypothesis, it is sometimes not necessary to do anything more than push it as far as it will go.

  • If you want me to believe in God, you must make me touch him.

  • Gratitude is a burden, and every burden is made to be shaken off.

  • We are far more liable to catch the vices than the virtues of our associates.

  • To brand man with infamy, and let him free, is an absurdity that peoples our forests with assassins. [Fr., Rendre l'homme infame, et le laisser libre, est une absurdite qui peuple nos forets d'assassins.]

  • The following general definition of an animal: a system of different organic molecules that have combined with one another, under the impulsion of a sensation similar to an obtuse and muffled sense of touch given to them by the creator of matter as a whole, until each one of them has found the most suitable position for its shape and comfort.

  • For me, my thoughts are my prostitutes.

  • First of all move me, surprise me, rend my heart; make me tremble, weep, shudder; outrage me; delight my eyes afterwards if you can.

  • I picture the vast realm of the sciences as an immense landscape scattered with patches of dark and light. The goal towards which we must work is either to extend the boundaries of the patches of light, or to increase their number. One of these tasks falls to the creative genius; the other requires a sort of sagacity combined with perfectionism.

  • Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

  • The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.

  • The good of the people must be the great purpose of government. By the laws of nature and of reason, the governors are invested with power to that end. And the greatest good of the people is liberty. It is to the state what health is to the individual.

  • Gratitude is a burden, and every burden is made to be shaken off

  • One cannot get rid of a good education, nor, unfortunately, of a bad one, which often is such because one has not wanted to defray the expenses of a good one.

  • Whether God exists or does not exist, He has come to rank among the most sublime and useless truths.

  • How had they met? By chance, like everybody else. What were there names? What's it to you? Where were they coming from? From the nearest place. Where were they going? Does anyone really know where they're going?

  • Scepticism is the first step towards truth.

  • The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and ... people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion.

  • A thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it. What has never been gone into impartially has never been properly gone into. Hence scepticism is the first step toward truth. It must be applied generally, because it is the touchstone.

  • 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.

  • Skepticism is the first step on the road to philosophy.

  • If there is one realm in which it is essential to be sublime, it is in wickedness. You spit on a petty thief, but you can't deny a kind of respect for the great criminal.

  • To say that man is a compound of strength and weakness, light and darkness, smallness and greatness, is not to indict him, it is to define him.

  • There's a bit of testicle at the bottom of our most sublime feelings and our purest tenderness.

  • Man was born to live with his fellow human beings. Separate him, isolate him, his character will go bad, a thousand ridiculous affects will invade his heart, extravagant thoughts will germinate in his brain, like thorns in an uncultivated land.

  • There are things I can't force. I must adjust. There are times when the greatest change needed is a change of my viewpoint.

  • The pit of a theatre is the one place where the tears of virtuous and wicked men alike are mingled.

  • There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.

  • The first step towards philosophy is incredulity.

  • You have to make it happen.

  • It is said that desire is a product of the will, but the converse is in fact true: will is a product of desire.

  • Gaiety is a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.

  • One declaims endlessly against the passions; one imputes all of man's suffering to them. One forgets that they are also the source of all his pleasures.

  • Those who fear the facts will forever try to discredit the fact-finders.

  • All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings... We must run roughshod over all these ancient puerilities, overturn the barriers that reason never erected, give back to the arts and sciences the liberty that is so precious to them.

  • When shall we see poets born? After a time of disasters and great misfortunes, when harrowed nations begin to breathe again. And then, shaken by the terror of such spectacles, imaginations will paint things entirely strange to those who have not witnessed them.

  • All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings.

  • The general interest of the masses might take the place of the insight of genius if it were allowed freedom of action.

  • Doctors are always working to preserve our health and cooks to destroy it, but the latter are the more often successful.

  • Instinct guides the animal better than the man. In the animal it is pure, in man it is led astray by his reason and intelligence.

  • What a hell of an economic system! Some are replete with everything while others, whose stomachs are no less demanding, whose hunger is just as recurrent, have nothing to bite on. The worst of it is the constrained posture need puts you in. The needy man does not walk like the rest; he skips, slithers, twists, crawls.

  • Only the bad man is alone.

  • In general, children, like men, and men, like children, prefer entertainment to education.

  • My ideas are my whores.

  • At an early age I sucked up the milk of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Terence, Anacreon, Plato and Euripides, diluted with that of Moses and the prophets.

  • But if you will recall the history of our civil troubles, you will see half the nation bathe itself, out of piety, in the blood of the other half, and violate the fundamental feelings of humanity in order to sustain the cause of God: as though it were necessary to cease to be a man in order to prove oneself religious!

  • The man who first pronounced the barbarous word God ought to have been immediately destroyed.

  • I like better for one to say some foolish thing upon important matters than to be silent. That becomes the subject of discussion and dispute, and the truth is discovered.

  • As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.

  • All children are essentially criminal.

  • The Christian religion teaches us to imitate a God that is cruel, insidious, jealous, and implacable in his wrath.

  • You can be sure that a painter reveals himself in his work as much as and more than a writer does in his.

  • First move me, astonish me, break my heart, let me tremble, weep, stare, be enraged-only then regale my eyes.

  • You risk just as much in being credulous as in being suspicious.

  • What a fine comedy this world would be if one did not play a part in it.

  • When we know to read our own hearts, we acquire wisdom of the heartsof others.

  • Are we not madder than those first inhabitants of the plain of Sennar? We know that the distance separating the earth from the sky is infinite, and yet we do not stop building our tower.

  • Une danse est un poe' me. A dance is a poem.

  • To be born in imbecility, in the midst of pain and crisis; to be the plaything of ignorance, error, need, sickness, wickedness, and passions; to return step by step to imbecility, from the time of lisping to that of doting; to live among knaves and charlatans of all kinds; to die between one man who takes your pulse and another who troubles your head; never to know where you come from, why you come and where you are going! That is what is called the most important gift of our parents and nature. Life.

  • Give, but, if possible, spare the poor man the shame of begging.

  • I have not the hope of being immortal, because the desire of it has not given me that vanity.

  • I am wholly yours - you are everything to me; we will sustain each other in all the ills of life it may please fate to inflict upon us; you will soothe my troubles; I will comfort you in yours.

  • To describe women, the pen should be dipped in the humid colors of the rainbow, and the paper dried with the dust gathered from the wings of a butterfly.

  • If there are one hundred thousand damned souls for one saved soul, the devil has always the advantage without having given up his son to death.

  • How old the world is! I walk between two eternities.... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, thatvalley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don't want to die!

  • Passions destroy more prejudices than philosophy does.

  • It has been said that love robs those who have it of their wit, and gives it to those who have none.

  • To prove the Gospels by a miracle is to prove an absurdity by something contrary to nature.

  • I discuss with myself questions of politics, love, taste, or philosophy. I let my mind rove wantonly, give it free rein to followany idea, wise or mad that may present itself.... My ideas are my harlots.

  • The wisest among us is very lucky never to have met the woman, be she beautiful or ugly, intelligent or stupid, who could drive him crazy enough to be fit to be put into an asylum.

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