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

Denis Diderot

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Denis Diderot
Age: 70 †
Born: 1713
Born: October 5
Died: 1784
Died: July 31
Abbé
Art Critic
Art Theorist
Correspondent
Encyclopédistes
Essayist
Historian
Lexicographer
Literary Critic
Literary Theorist
Lumières
Diderot
Believe
Parsley
Hemlock
God
Mistake
Literature
Religious
Important

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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.
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Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.
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We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.
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Gaiety is a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.
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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.
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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.
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Jacques said that his master said that everything good or evil we encounter here below was written on high.
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Only God and some few rare geniuses can keep forging ahead into novelty.
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The general interest of the masses might take the place of the insight of genius if it were allowed freedom of action.
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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.
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Tous les jours on couche avec des femmes qu'on n'aime pas, et l'on ne couche pas avec des femmes qu'on aime. Every day we sleep with women we do not love and don't sleep with the women we do love.
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We are far more liable to catch the vices than the virtues of our associates.
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But if you will recall the history of our civil troubles, you will see half the nation bathe itself, out of piety, in the blood of the other half, and violate the fundamental feelings of humanity in order to sustain the cause of God: as though it were necessary to cease to be a man in order to prove oneself religious!
Denis Diderot
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No man has received from nature the right to command his fellow human beings.
Denis Diderot
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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.
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I feel, I think, I judge therefore, a part of organized matter like me is capable of feeling, thinking, and judging.
Denis Diderot
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Good music is very close to primitive language.
Denis Diderot
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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.
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To prove the Gospels by a miracle is to prove an absurdity by something contrary to nature.
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Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world.
Denis Diderot