Top 160 Denis Diderot Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 4

51. “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.”

— Denis Diderot

52. “Jacques said that his master said that everything good or evil we encounter here below was written on high.”

— Denis Diderot

53. “Those authors into whose hands nature has placed a magic wand, with which they no sooner touch us than we forget the unhappiness in life, than the darkness leaves our soul, and we are reconciled to existence, should be placed among the benefactors of the human race.”

— Denis Diderot

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

— Denis Diderot

55. “One composition is meagre, though it has many figures; another is rich, though it has few.”

— Denis Diderot

56. “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?”

— Denis Diderot

57. “The fact is that she was terribly undressed and I was extremely undressed too. The fact is that I still had my hand where she didn’t have anything and she had hers where the same wasn’t quite true of me. The fact is that I found myself underneath her and consequently she found herself on top of me.”

— Denis Diderot

58. “Does anyone really know where they’re going to?”

— Denis Diderot

59. “The bad gives rise to the good, the good inspires the better, the better produces the excellent, the excellent is followed by the bizarre.”

— Denis Diderot

60. “Master, master, you obviously haven’t thought about this at all. We only ever feel sorry for ourselves, believe me.”

— Denis Diderot

61. “The good of the people must be the great purpose of government. By the laws of nature and of reason, the governors are invested with power to that end. And the greatest good of the people is liberty. It is to the state what health is to the individual.”

— Denis Diderot

62. “We swallow with one gulp the lie that flatters us, and drink drop by drop the truth which is bitter to us.”

— Denis Diderot

63. “In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice.”

— Denis Diderot

64. “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.”

— Denis Diderot

65. “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.”

— Denis Diderot

66. “Does not vanity itself cease to be blamable, is it not even ennobled, when it is directed to laudable objects, when it confines itself to prompting us to great and generous actions?”

— Denis Diderot

67. “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.”

— Denis Diderot

68. “Shakespeare’s fault is not the greatest into which a poet may fall. It merely indicates a deficiency of taste.”

— Denis Diderot

69. “Posterity for the philosopher is what the other world is for the religious man.”

— Denis Diderot

70. “Only the bad man is alone.”

— Denis Diderot

71. “It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley; but not at all so to believe or not in God.”

— Denis Diderot

72. “Ignorance is less remote from the truth than prejudice.”

— Denis Diderot

73. “The blood of Jesus Christ can cover a multitude of sins, it seems to me.”

— Denis Diderot

74. “If your little savage were left to himself and be allowed to retain all his ignorance, he would in time join the infant’s reasoning to the grown man’s passion, he would strangle his father and sleep with his mother.”

— Denis Diderot

75. “The Christian religion teaches us to imitate a God that is cruel, insidious, jealous, and implacable in his wrath.”

— Denis Diderot

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

— Denis Diderot

77. “There is no true sovereign except the nation; there can be no true legislator except the people.”

— Denis Diderot

78. “Every man has his dignity. I’m willing to forget mine, but at my own discretion and not when someone else tells me to.”

— Denis Diderot

79. “A thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it. What has never been gone into impartially has never been properly gone into. Hence scepticism is the first step toward truth. It must be applied generally, because it is the touchstone.”

— Denis Diderot

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

— Denis Diderot

81. “They mistake the first manifestations of a developing sexual nature for the voice of God calling them to Himself; and it is precisely when nature is inciting them that they embrace a fashion of life contrary to nature’s wish.”

— Denis Diderot

82. “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.”

— Denis Diderot

83. “In general, children, like men, and men, like children, prefer entertainment to education.”

— Denis Diderot

84. “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.”

— Denis Diderot

85. “What has not been examined impartially has not been well examined. Skepticism is therefore the first step towards truth.”

— Denis Diderot

86. “As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.”

— Denis Diderot

87. “If there are one hundred thousand damned souls for one saved soul, the devil has always the advantage without having given up his son to death.”

— Denis Diderot

88. “Isn’t it better to have men being ungrateful than to miss a chance to do good?”

— Denis Diderot

89. “Power acquired by violence is only a usurpation, and lasts only as long as the force of him who commands prevails over that of those who obey.”

— Denis Diderot

90. “It has been said that love robs those who have it of their wit, and gives it to those who have none.”

— Denis Diderot

91. “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!”

— Denis Diderot

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

— Denis Diderot

93. “Evil always turns up in this world through some genius or other.”

— Denis Diderot

94. “If reason be a gift of Heaven, and we can say as much of faith, Heaven has certainly made us two gifts not only incompatible, but in direct contradiction to each other. In order to solve the difficulty, we are compelled to say either that faith is a chimera or that reason is useless.”

— Denis Diderot

95. “Good music is very close to primitive language.”

— Denis Diderot

96. “There are cats and cats.”

— Denis Diderot

97. “All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs.”

— Denis Diderot

98. “One cannot get rid of a good education, nor, unfortunately, of a bad one, which often is such because one has not wanted to defray the expenses of a good one.”

— Denis Diderot

99. “I can be expected to look for truth but not to find it.”

— Denis Diderot

100. “The infant runs toward it with its eyes closed, the adult is stationary, the old man approaches it with his back turned.”

— Denis Diderot