Denis Diderot Quotes

111 Sourced Quotes

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