Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderotʁo]; 5 October 1713 – 31 July 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent figure during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the Encyclopédie along with Jean le Rond d'Alembert...
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth5 October 1713
eggs church temples
Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world.
pain passion ignorance
To be born in imbecility, in the midst of pain and crisis; to be the plaything of ignorance, error, need, sickness, wickedness, and passions; to return step by step to imbecility, from the time of lisping to that of doting; to live among knaves and charlatans of all kinds; to die between one man who takes your pulse and another who troubles your head; never to know where you come from, why you come and where you are going! That is what is called the most important gift of our parents and nature. Life.
mean power order
Watch out for the fellow who talks about putting things in order! Putting things in order always means getting other people under your control.
running eye men
The infant runs toward it with its eyes closed, the adult is stationary, the old man approaches it with his back turned.
love passion order
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!
human-nature conventions should
It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it.
literature language music-is
Good music is very close to primitive language.
divorce population literature
The possibility of divorce renders both marriage partners stricter in their observance of the duties they owe to each other. Divorces help to improve morals and to increase the population.
men doe needs
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.
fall rocks dust
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!
love change time
The first promise exchanged by two beings of flesh was at the foot of a rock that was crumbling into dust; they took as witness for their constancy a sky that is not the same for a single instant; everything changed in them and around them, and they believed their hearts free of vicissitudes. O children! always children!
men animal reason
Instinct guides the animal better than the man. In the animal it is pure, in man it is led astray by his reason and intelligence.
distance sky earth
Are we not madder than those first inhabitants of the plain of Sennar? We know that the distance separating the earth from the sky is infinite, and yet we do not stop building our tower.
kings hands rope
His hands would plait the priest's guts, if he had no rope, to strangle kings.