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.
DENIS DIDEROTPoetry needs something on the scale of the grand, the barbarous, the savage.
More Denis Diderot Quotes
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You have to make it happen.
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My ideas are my whores.
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The world is the house of the strong.
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There are things I can’t force. I must adjust. There are times when the greatest change needed is a change of my viewpoint.
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There are cats and cats.
DENIS DIDEROT -
Good music is very close to primitive language.
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It is said that desire is a product of the will, but the converse is in fact true: will is a product of desire.
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What has not been examined impartially has not been well examined. Skepticism is therefore the first step towards truth.
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There is less harm to be suffered in being mad among madmen than in being sane all by oneself.
DENIS DIDEROT -
Does anyone really know where they’re going to?
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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 -
Oh! how near are genius and madness! Men imprison them and chain them, or raise statues to them.
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The Christian religion teaches us to imitate a God that is cruel, insidious, jealous, and implacable in his wrath.
DENIS DIDEROT -
Philosophy is as far separated from impiety as religion is from fanaticism.
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There’s a bit of testicle at the bottom of our most sublime feelings and our purest tenderness.
DENIS DIDEROT -
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.
DENIS DIDEROT -
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 -
Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world.
DENIS DIDEROT -
Justice is the first virtue of those who command, and stops the complaints of those who obey.
DENIS DIDEROT -
Two qualities essential for the artist: moralityand perspective.
DENIS DIDEROT -
It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it.
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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.
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I feel, I think, I judge; therefore, a part of organized matter like me is capable of feeling, thinking, and judging.
DENIS DIDEROT -
A thing is not proved because no one has ever questioned it. Skepticism is the first step toward truth.
DENIS DIDEROT -
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.
DENIS DIDEROT -
There is no true sovereign except the nation; there can be no true legislator except the people.
DENIS DIDEROT