Denis Diderot Quotes

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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 skepticism is the first step toward truth. It must be applied generally, because it is the touchstone.

Denis Diderot
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.

Denis Diderot
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!

Denis Diderot
Time, matter, space — all, it may be, are no more than a point.

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

Denis Diderot
Shakespeare's fault is not the greatest into which a poet may fall. It merely indicates a deficiency of taste.

Denis Diderot
Gaiety — a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.

Denis Diderot
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.

Denis Diderot
Libertines are hideous spiders, that often catch pretty butterflies.

Denis Diderot
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.

Denis Diderot
Gratitude is a burden, and all burdens are made to be cast off.

Denis Diderot
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.

Denis Diderot
There is only one passion, the passion for happiness.

Denis Diderot
Women swallow at one mouthful the lie that flatters, and drink drop by drop a truth that is bitter.

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

Denis Diderot
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.

Denis Diderot
There is only one virtue, justice; only one duty, to be happy; only one corollary, not to overvalue life and not to fear death.

Denis Diderot
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.

Denis Diderot
The moral universe is so closely linked to the physical universe that it is scarcely likely that they are not one and the same machine.

Denis Diderot
Nature, equal in her distributions, entirely destitute of malice, follows only necessary and immutable laws, when she either produces beings or destroys them, when she causes those to suffer, whose construction creates sensibility; when she scatters among them good and evil; when she subjects them to incessant change.

Denis Diderot
The animal is a system of different organic molecules, which, impelled by dim sensations similar to those of obtuse and vague touch - sensations which have been imparted to them by Him who created matter in general - have combined, until each has found the position most suitable to its form and to its repose.

Denis Diderot