Quotes by Denis Diderot

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What is glory, in its broadest sense? The satisfaction which you enjoy in the depths of your soul in the consciousness of some great thing, and which deserves always to be applauded... The greater men were, the more ardent they were for it; and the more ardent they were for her, the greater they were.

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Do danie; but if you are unable, save the poor from the shame of asking by extending your hand.

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Nothing is harder to forgive than the merits of another.

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Envy... a feeling that even friendship doesn't always extinguish.

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If there is still freedom, it is the result of ignorance. When two possibilities are available to us and we have no reason to prefer one of them, only then do we choose the one we want.

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Men distinguished by their talents must spend their time as respect for themselves and their posterity demands. What would posterity think of us if we left them nothing as a legacy?

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Nothing is more contradictory to living nature, to animated and sensitive beings, than silence.

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By rewarding the good, we thus punish the bad.

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In vain the coward beats his breast to muster up his courage; courage must be had before it can be strengthened in relation to those who possess it.

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It is enough for the truth to triumph over the few but deserving. The truth does not aim to please everyone.

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Even the staunchest skeptics live with the hope that they could be wrong.

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It is much easier to miss the meal and the prayer than the shoes.

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Deep thoughts are iron nails, so good that they cannot be removed by anything.

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Brilliant people read little, do a lot, and create themselves.

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Everything is defined by utility.

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Any language is basically poor for a writer with a vivid imagination.

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The height of madness is to set as your goal the destruction of passions.

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The inconvenience is not in having opinions, but in letting yourself be blinded by them in spite of experience.

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We must strive to popularize philosophy. If we want philosophy to progress, we must bring the people to the level of the philosophers.

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I wandered at night in a dense forest and my only guide was the faint flame of the candle I held in my hand. Suddenly, a stranger appeared before me and said: "Friend, blow out the candle so that I can find the right path." This stranger was a theologian.

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The intelligent man is a combination of the craziest molecules.

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The intelligent man sees before him the vast field of the possible, the uneducated sees the possible only in what is. Therefore, one can behave timidly, and another, boldly.

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Only he who is as stupid as us is smart.

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Talent is not a noble title to be passed down from one generation to another.

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There is no philosophy without the idea of ​​the whole.

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Passions are doomed forever, we attribute all human troubles to them, but at the same time we forget that they are actually the source of our joys.

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The man who readily admits that he does not know what he really does not, makes me believe in what he explains to me.

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Does the listener possess more truthful information than the speaker? Not nearly. That is why there are few in the whole city who understand what you are talking about.

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Nature is like a woman who likes to change her clothes all the time - the variety of her costumes, which draw your eye to one part of the body, then to the other, gives persistent admirers the hope of never seeing her in full.

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The truth is not without spicy attributes that can be captured if you are gifted with genius.

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Truth, goodness, and beauty have their rights; they are denied but ultimately admired; what is not under their sway may delight for a time, but in the end bore.

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When God, from whom we have received our understanding, demands from us the sacrifice of it, he is like a magician who removes what he has given.

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Woman is the only creature of nature who reciprocates our feeling with feeling, and who is made happy by the happiness she gives us.

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Never lose sight of the fact that nature is not a god, man is not a machine, an assumption is not a fact.

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One wicked and powerful man is enough to make a hundred thousand others weep, groan, and curse their lives.

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Serenity resides only in the soul of a virtuous person; there is night in the soul of a wicked man.

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Emotion is delicate to express; he searches for it, stuttering in the process, or in his impatience causes the flame to flash. However, this flash is not the emotion itself; but we see it in the light.

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Turn off your lights to see the road better!

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Theologians have long been encouraged to reconcile the dogma of eternal punishment with God's infinite mercy. They are still negotiating today.

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The wise see far in the immeasurable multitude of possibilities; the stupid pretty much only believes that what is possible is possible. Perhaps this is what makes one timid and the other reckless.

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Miracles happen where you believe in them, and the more you believe in them, the more often they happen.

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Skepticism is the first step towards truth.

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Reason has prejudices, senses uncertainties, memory limits, imagination flashes, tools imperfections; the symptoms are infinite, the causes are hidden, the forms are perhaps temporary and changeable. What do we have against so many obstacles, which are within us and which nature piles up in front of us from the outside? With slow experience and limited thinking: these are the levers with which philosophy wants to move the world.

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The one who freely admits his ignorance in a certain matter in which he is not expert, instills in me the belief that he knows what he is trying to explain thoroughly.

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Knowledge, which has no basis in nature, can be compared to the northern forests, which lack tree roots. It only takes a gust of wind, just a small fact, to overturn and uproot an entire forest of trees and ideas.

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As long as things are only in our understanding, we call them our opinions; these are knowledge that can be true or false, acceptable or controversial. Only when they are connected to external facts do they gain muscle and take on a body.

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The region of mathematicians is a purely intellectual world, in which what we take to be strict truth definitely loses its primacy as soon as we bring it to our earth.

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They can demand that I seek the truth, but they cannot demand that I find it.

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Be a disciple of the rainbow, not its slave.

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People usually swallow pleasant lies with their mouths full, but only swallow the bitter truth drop by drop.

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The poet is a man with a strong imagination, who himself is moved, frightened by the imaginary figures he has created.

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The theater is the only place where the tears of the virtuous and the wicked flow together.

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The role of the author is rather vain; it belongs to a man who thinks he can teach the audience a lesson. And what is the critical role? Even more vain; belongs to a man who thinks he can teach a lesson to someone who thinks he can teach an audience a lesson.

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If you were born with a waist, if nature has given you a straight mind and a sensitive heart, avoid the company of people for a while and study yourself.

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A woman is a creature with extreme strength and weakness: she can faint at the sight of a mouse or a spider, and she often faces life's greatest terrors fearlessly.

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A fool knows no good book; the smart one does nothing wrong.

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There is as secret an alliance between women as there is between the priests of a religion. They hate each other, but they protect each other.

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What has never been doubted is not proven.

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God crucifies God in order to receive God's forgiveness - Baron Hontan said very wittily. These sarcastic two lines explain more than a hundred thick folios for or against Christianity.

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If a hundred thousand damned fall upon one saved, the devil always has the advantage, without having sent his son to death.

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Judging by how much blood has been shed in the name of religion, religion has done more harm than good.

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The greater or lesser degree of belief in supernatural forces is always determined by the lesser or greater degree of civilization.

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Manners are in art what moral corruption is in peoples.

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The interest of the truth (...) would require that those who think should not consider it beneath their dignity to join those who work: in this way, the contemplative would be relieved of laborious action, and the manual laborer would set a goal in the midst of his endless work.