262 Quotes by Denis Diderot

The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid.

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

My ideas are my whores.

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

What a hell of an economic system! Some are replete with everything while others, whose stomachs are no less demanding, whose hunger is just as recurrent, have nothing to bite on. The worst of it is the constrained posture need puts you in. The needy man does not walk like the rest; he skips, slithers, twists, crawls.

We are far more liable to catch the vices than the virtues of our associates.

How old the world is! I walk between two eternities.... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, thatvalley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don't want to die!

Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.

What a fine comedy this world would be if one did not play a part in it.