Quote

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.

Denis Diderot

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Deny
Thieves
Essentials
Petty
Respect
Sublime
Great
Realm
Kind
Criminal
Realms
Thief
Criminals
Spit
Essential
Wickedness

More quotes by Denis Diderot

Image
In general, children, like men, and men, like children, prefer entertainment to education.
Denis Diderot
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I can be expected to look for truth but not to find it.
Denis Diderot
Image
There are cats and cats.
Denis Diderot
Image
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
Image
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
Image
No man has received from nature the right to command his fellow human beings.
Denis Diderot
Image
You risk just as much in being credulous as in being suspicious.
Denis Diderot
Image
Which is the greater merit, to enlighten the human race, which remains forever, or to save one's fatherland, which is perishable?
Denis Diderot
Image
He whom we call a gentleman is no longer the man of Nature.
Denis Diderot
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Ignorance is less remote from the truth than prejudice.
Denis Diderot
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Justice is the first virtue of those who command, and stops the complaints of those who obey.
Denis Diderot
Image
The blood of Jesus Christ can cover a multitude of sins, it seems to me.
Denis Diderot
Image
Posterity for the philosopher is what the other world is for the religious man.
Denis Diderot