Denis Diderot Quotes

There are two public prosecutors, and one of them is at your door, punishing crimes against society; the other is nature herself. She is familiar with all those vices that escape the law.

I don't think much of these eccentrics. Some people turn them into familiar acquaintances, even friends. Once a year they interest me, when I meet them, because their character stands in contrast to others and they break that fastidious uniformity which our education, our social conventions, and our habitual proprieties have introduced.

ولكنه شيء لا يُصدّق أن تشعري بكل هذا البغض لحالةٍ تؤدّين واجباتها بكل هذه بكل هذه السهولة والدقة

The more man ascends through the past, and the more he launches into the future, the greater he will be, and all these philosophers and ministers and truth-telling men who have fallen victims to the stupidity of nations, the atrocities of priests, the fury of tyrants, what consolation was left for them in death? This: That prejudice would pass, and that posterity would pour out the vial of ignominy upon their enemies. O Posterity! Holy and sacred stay of the unhappy and the oppressed; thou who art just, thou who art incorruptible, thou who findest the good man, who unmaskest the hypocrite, who breakest down the tyrant, may thy sure faith, thy consoling faith never, never abandon me!

There are things I can't force. I must adjust. There are times when the greatest change needed is a change of my viewpoint.

Хората престават да мислят, когато престанат да четат.

Justice is the first virtue of those who command, and stops the complaints of those who obey.

Οι προτάσεις είναι σαν αιχμηρά καρφιά που μπήγουν την αλήθεια στη μνήμη μας.

Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs.

The following general definition of an animal: a system of different organic molecules that have combined with one another, under the impulsion of a sensation similar to an obtuse and muffled sense of touch given to them by the creator of matter as a whole, until each one of them has found the most suitable position for it shape and comfort.

We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.

People praise virtue, but they hate it, they run away from it. It freezes you to death, and in this world you've got to keep your feet warm.

We are constantly railing against the passions; we ascribe to them all of man’s afflictions, and we forget that they are also the source of all his pleasures … But what provokes me is that only their adverse side is considered … and yet only passions, and great passions, can raise the soul to great things. Without them there is no sublimity, either in morals or in creativity. Art returns to infancy, and virtue becomes small-minded.

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

Jacques said that his master said that everything good or evil we encounter here below was written on high.