Quotes About Diderot

Diderot was so flustered by the affront that he only thought of a clever retort as he was walking down the stairs on his way out. The encounter led him to devise the term "l'esprit d'escalier," "the wit of the staircase," for the experience of thinking of a witty comeback only after it is too late to deliver it.

Diderot's solution to the limits of language was to become himself a worker: "There are machines so hard to describe and skills so elusive that ... it has often been necessary to get hold of such machines, set them in operation, and lend one's hand to the work.

Diderot took the ground that, if orthodox religion be true Christ was guilty of suicide. Having the power to defend himself he should have used it.

Gaiety --a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.

For even the ordinary well-read person, the French Enlightenment is largely restricted to the three big-name philosophes: Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire.

In eighteenth century France the end was at hand when men bought the Encyclopedia and found Diderot there.

The names of Diderot and Baudelaire were coupled. Neither academic nor spouting the jargon of the usual critic, the Salons of Baudelaire are the production of a humanist.

I have observed, indeed, generally, that while in protestant countries the defections from the Platonic Christianity of the priests is to Deism, in catholic countries they are to Atheism. Diderot, D'Alembert, D'Holbach, Condorcet, are known to have been among the most virtuous of men. Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than the love of God. [Letter to Thomas Law, 13 June 1814]

The notion that scientific truth directly fosters moral goodness — a legacy of gifted but in this respect misguided amateurs of science like Diderot and Goethe — was receding in the nineteenth century before positivistic procedures which sharply differentiated facts from values.

The enjoyment of freedom which could be exercised without any motivation would be the real hallmark of a maniac.

To speak to you frankly, Reader, I find that you are the more wicked of the two of us. How satisfied would I be if it were as easy for me to protect myself from your calumny as it is for you to protect yourself from the boredom or the danger of my work!

Mis ideas son mis rameras

Yo os haría una pregunta, señor ¿por qué, entre todas ls ideas funestas que pasan por la cabeza de una religiosa desesperada, no está la de pegarle fuego a la casa?

Rousseau alienated his aristocratic patrons; he quarrelled with most of his friends and well-wishers, including Hume and Diderot, many of whom also ended up deriding him as a madman. But he disagreed most violently – and productively – with Voltaire.