Top 160 Denis Diderot Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.”

— Denis Diderot

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

— Denis Diderot

103. “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.”

— Denis Diderot

104. “Bad company is as instructive as licentiousness. One makes up for the loss of one’s innocence with the loss of one’s prejudices.”

— Denis Diderot

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

— Denis Diderot

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

— Denis Diderot

107. “People praise virtue, but they hate it, they run away from it. It freezes you to death, and in this world you’ve got to keep your feet warm.”

— Denis Diderot

108. “It is raining bombs on the house of the Lord. I go in fear and trembling lest one of these terrible bombers gets into difficulties.”

— Denis Diderot

109. “At an early age I sucked up the milk of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Terence, Anacreon, Plato and Euripides, diluted with that of Moses and the prophets.”

— Denis Diderot

110. “You risk just as much in being credulous as in being suspicious.”

— Denis Diderot

111. “Gaiety is a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.”

— Denis Diderot

112. “The best mannered people make the most absurd lovers.”

— Denis Diderot

113. “His hands would plait the priest’s guts, if he had no rope, to strangle kings.”

— Denis Diderot

114. “Because, without knowing what is written up above, none of us knows what we want or what we are doing, and we follow our whims which we call reason, or our reason which is often nothing but a dangerous whim which sometimes turns out well, sometimes badly.”

— Denis Diderot

115. “If ever anybody dedicated his whole life to the “enthusiasm for truth and justice” using this phrase in the good sense it was Diderot.”

— Denis Diderot

116. “He whom we call a gentleman is no longer the man of Nature.”

— Denis Diderot

117. “Anyone who takes it upon himself, on his private authority, to break a bad law, thereby authorizes everyone else to break the good ones.”

— Denis Diderot

118. “Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.”

— Denis Diderot

119. “Time, matter, space – all, it may be, are no more than a point.”

— Denis Diderot

120. “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.”

— Denis Diderot

121. “If a misplaced admiration shows imbecility, an affected criticism shows vice of character. Expose thyself rather to appear a beast than false.”

— Denis Diderot

122. “Superstition is more injurious to God than atheism.”

— Denis Diderot

123. “It was ordained that you would have the title to the thing and I would have the thing itself.”

— Denis Diderot

124. “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.”

— Denis Diderot

125. “I have not the hope of being immortal, because the desire of it has not given me that vanity.”

— Denis Diderot

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

— Denis Diderot

127. “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!”

— Denis Diderot

128. “Which is the greater merit, to enlighten the human race, which remains forever, or to save one’s fatherland, which is perishable?”

— Denis Diderot

129. “Gratitude is a burden, and every burden is made to be shaken off.”

— Denis Diderot

130. “How many wisely conceived projects have failed and will fail in the future! How many insane projects have succeeded and will succeed!”

— Denis Diderot

131. “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.”

— Denis Diderot

132. “I feel, I think, I judge; therefore, a part of organized matter like me is capable of feeling, thinking, and judging.”

— Denis Diderot

133. “You can be sure that a painter reveals himself in his work as much as and more than a writer does in his.”

— Denis Diderot

134. “How easy it is to tell tales!”

— Denis Diderot

135. “The world is the house of the strong.”

— Denis Diderot

136. “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.”

— Denis Diderot

137. “Philosophy is as far separated from impiety as religion is from fanaticism.”

— Denis Diderot

138. “Although a man may wear fine clothing, if he lives peacefully; and is good, self-possessed, has faith and is pure; and if he does not hurt any living being, he is a holy man.”

— Denis Diderot

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

— Denis Diderot

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

— Denis Diderot

141. “There are two public prosecutors, and one of them is at your door, punishing crimes against society; the other is nature herself. She is familiar with all those vices that escape the law.”

— Denis Diderot

142. “And he added that prudence in no way assured us of success but consoled us and excused us in failure.”

— Denis Diderot

143. “I am wholly yours – you are everything to me; we will sustain each other in all the ills of life it may please fate to inflict upon us; you will soothe my troubles; I will comfort you in yours.”

— Denis Diderot

144. “Two qualities essential for the artist: moralityand perspective.”

— Denis Diderot

145. “When shall we see poets born? After a time of disasters and great misfortunes, when harrowed nations begin to breathe again. And then, shaken by the terror of such spectacles, imaginations will paint things entirely strange to those who have not witnessed them.”

— Denis Diderot

146. “The world is the house of the strong. I shall not know until the end what I have lost or won in this place, in this vast gambling den where I have spent more than sixty years, dice box in hand, shaking the dice.”

— Denis Diderot

147. “It is not the man who is beside himself, but he who is cool and collected, – who is master of his countenance, of his voice, of his actions, of his gestures, of every part of his play, – who can work upon others at his pleasure.”

— Denis Diderot

148. “Si en este mundo no se dice casi nada que sea escuchado como debiera, hay algo mucho peor, y es que no se hace casi nada que sea juzgado tal y como se ha hecho.”

— Denis Diderot

149. “If the weather is too cold or rainy, I take shelter in the Regence Cafe, where I entertain myself by watching chess being played. Paris is the world center, and this cafe is the Paris centre for the finest skill at this game.”

— Denis Diderot

150. “The decisions of law courts should never be printed: in the long run, they form a counter authority to the law.”

— Denis Diderot