262 Quotes by Denis Diderot

In order to get as much fame as one’s father one has to much more able than he.

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.

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.

If ever anybody dedicated his whole life to the “enthusiasm for truth and justice” using this phrase in the good sense it was Diderot.

One declaims endlessly against the passions; one imputes all of man’s suffering to them. One forgets that they are also the source of all his pleasures.

La poe sie veutquelque chose d’e norme, debarbare et de sauvage. Poetry needs something on the scale of the grand, the barbarous, the savage.

When one compares the talents one has with those of a Leibniz, one is tempted to throw away one’s books and go die quietly in the dark of some forgotten corner.

How had they met? By chance, like everybody else. What were there names? What’s it to you? Where were they coming from? From the nearest place. Where were they going? Does anyone really know where they’re going?

It was ordained that you would have the title to the thing and I would have the thing itself.