Denis Diderot Quotes

If there is one realm in which it is essential to be sublime, it is in wickedness. You spit on a pet...

I picture the vast realm of the sciences as an immense landscape scattered with patches of dark and ...

One swallows the lie that flatters, but sips the bitter truth drop by drop.

Scepticism is the first step towards truth.

Power acquired by violence is only a usurpation, and lasts only as long as the force of him who comm...

If you want me to believe in God, you must make me touch him.

Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that ...

You have to make it happen.

No man has received from nature the right to command his fellow human beings.

The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and ... people whose aim is to disrupt soci...

Instinct guides the animal better than the man. In the animal it is pure in man it is led astray by...

You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, ...

There is only one passion, the passion for happiness.

There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge... observation of nature, reflection, and exp...

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

Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in th...

Only passions great passions can elevate the soul to great things.

When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can...

Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

Although a man may wear fine clothing, if he lives peacefully; and is good, self-possessed, has fait...

All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's...

Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can u...

Distance is a great promoter of admiration!

Isn't it better to have men be ungrateful than to miss a chance to do good?

People stop thinking when they cease to read.

Oh! how near are genius and madness! Men imprison them and chain them, or raise statues to them.

You risk just as much in being credulous as in being suspicious.

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

The best doctor is the one you run to and can't find.

It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it.

When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are o...

Whether God exists or does not exist, He has come to rank among the most sublime and useless truths.

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

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government they are not African or Asian o...

How had they met? By chance, like everybody else. What were there names? What's it to you? Where wer...

Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

Only passions, great passions can elevate the soul to great things.

The best doctor is the one you run for and can't find.

One cannot get rid of a good education, nor, unfortunately, of a bad one, which often is such becaus...