The general interest of the masses might take the place of the insight of genius if it were allowed freedom of action.
DENIS DIDEROTI feel, I think, I judge; therefore, a part of organized matter like me is capable of feeling, thinking, and judging.
More Denis Diderot Quotes
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And his hands would plait the priest’s entrails, For want of a rope, to strangle kings.
DENIS DIDEROT -
Integrity is the evidence of all civil virtues.
DENIS DIDEROT -
My ideas are my whores.
DENIS DIDEROT -
Ignorance is less remote from the truth than prejudice.
DENIS DIDEROT -
The best mannered people make the most absurd lovers.
DENIS DIDEROT -
My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.
DENIS DIDEROT -
If ever anybody dedicated his whole life to the “enthusiasm for truth and justice” using this phrase in the good sense it was Diderot.
DENIS DIDEROT -
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.
DENIS DIDEROT -
Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory.
DENIS DIDEROT -
All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs.
DENIS DIDEROT -
The blood of Jesus Christ can cover a multitude of sins, it seems to me.
DENIS DIDEROT -
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.
DENIS DIDEROT -
You risk just as much in being credulous as in being suspicious.
DENIS DIDEROT -
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.
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 -
Shakespeare’s fault is not the greatest into which a poet may fall. It merely indicates a deficiency of taste.
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 -
If a misplaced admiration shows imbecility, an affected criticism shows vice of character. Expose thyself rather to appear a beast than false.
DENIS DIDEROT -
The God of the Christians is a father who makes much of his apples, and very little of his children.
DENIS DIDEROT -
The man who first pronounced the barbarous word God ought to have been immediately destroyed.
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 -
Only a very bad theologian would confuse the certainty that follows revelation with the truths that are revealed. They are entirely different things.
DENIS DIDEROT -
Passions destroy more prejudices than philosophy does.
DENIS DIDEROT -
Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it.
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 -
Gratitude is a burden, and every burden is made to be shaken off.
DENIS DIDEROT