Denis Diderot Quotes

111 Sourced Quotes

Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world. What is it, this egg, before the seed is introduced into it? An insentient mass. And after the seed has been introduced to into it? What is it then? An insentient mass. For what is the seed itself other than a crude and inanimate fluid? How is this mass to make a transition to a different structure, to sentience, to life? Through heat. And what will produce that heat in it? Motion.

Denis Diderot
And [with] the guts of the last priest
Let's shake the neck of the last king.

Denis Diderot
How old the world is! I walk between two eternities... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, that valley 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!

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

Denis Diderot
In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice.

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

Denis Diderot
The fact is that she was terribly undressed and I was extremely undressed too. The fact is that I still had my hand where she didn't have anything and she had hers where the same wasn't quite true of me. The fact is that I found myself underneath her and consequently she found herself on top of me.

Denis Diderot
Strong thoughts are iron nails driven in the mind, that nothing can draw out.

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

Denis Diderot
There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination. 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.

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

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

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

Denis Diderot
Happiest are the people who give most happiness to others.

Denis Diderot
Go further, and require each of them to make a contribution: you will see how many things are still missing, and you will be obliged to get the assistance of a large number of men who belong to different classes, priceless men, but to whom the gates of the academies are nonetheless closed because of their social station. All the members of these learned societies are more than is needed for a single object of human science; all the societies together are not sufficient for a science of man in general.

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

Denis Diderot
If your little savage were left to himself and to his native blindness, he would in time join the infant's reasoning to the grown man's passion—he would strangle his father and sleep with his mother.

Denis Diderot
How did they meet? By chance, like everybody … Where did they come from? From the nearest place. Where were they going? Do we know where we are going?

Denis Diderot
Prosperity unmasks the vices; adversity reveals the virtues.

Denis Diderot
No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a gift from heaven, and every individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he is in enjoyment of his reason.

Denis Diderot
Superstition is more injurious to God than atheism.

Denis Diderot
There is not a Musselman alive who would not imagine that he was performing an action pleasing to God and his Holy Prophet by exterminating every Christian on earth, while the Christians are scarcely more tolerant on their side.

Denis Diderot
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.

Denis Diderot
The best doctor is the one you run for and can't find.

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

Denis Diderot
What has not been examined impartially has not been well examined. Skepticism is therefore the first step toward truth.

Denis Diderot
When one compares the talents one has with those of a Leibniz, one is tempted to throw away one's books and go die quietly in the dark of some forgotten corner.

Denis Diderot
Without the English, reason and philosophy would still be in the most despicable infancy in France.

Denis Diderot
There is no true sovereign except the nation; there can be no true legislator except the people.

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

Denis Diderot