Quotes from Denis Diderot

There is only one passion, the passion for happiness.

To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly. What a noble aim is that of the zealot who tortures himself like a madman in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing, and who, if he succeeded, would end up a complete monster!

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.

To say that man is a compound of strength and weakness, light and darkness, smallness and greatness, is not to indict him, it is to define him.

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.

To prove the Gospels by a miracle is to prove an absurdity by something contrary to nature.

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

Skepticism is the first step on the road to philosophy.

We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves.

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.

Superstition is more injurious to God than atheism.

Watch out for the fellow who talks about putting things in order! Putting things in order always means getting other people under your control.

A nation which thinks that it is belief in God and not good law which makes people honest does not seem to me very advanced.

The man who first pronounced the barbarous word God ought to have been immediately destroyed.

It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley, but to believe or not believe in God is not important at all.

The God of the Christians is a father who makes much of his apples, and very little of his children.

Only God and some few rare geniuses can keep forging ahead into novelty.

There is no good father who would want to resemble our Heavenly Father.

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

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.

If there is one realm in which it is essential to be sublime, it is in wickedness. You spit on a petty thief, but you can't deny a kind of respect for the great criminal.

Happiest are the people who give most happiness to others.

Doctors are always working to preserve our health and cooks to destroy it, but the latter are the more often successful.

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