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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.

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

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We swallow with one gulp the lie that flatters us, and drink drop by drop the truth which is bitter to us.
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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.
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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.
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There are cats and cats.
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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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The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion.
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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.
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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.
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Mankind have banned the Divinity from their presence they have relegated him to a sanctuary the walls of the temple restrict his view he does not exist outside of it.
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The Christian religion teaches us to imitate a God that is cruel, insidious, jealous, and implacable in his wrath.
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One must be oneself very little of a philosopher not to feel that the finest privilege of our reason consists in not believing in anything by the impulsion of a blind and mechanical instinct, and that it is to dishonour reason to put it in bonds as the Chaldeans did. Man is born to think for himself.
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There is less harm to be suffered in being mad among madmen than in being sane all by oneself.
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En ge ne ral, plus un peuple est civilise , poli, moins ses moeurs sont poe tiques tout s'affaiblit en s'adoucissant. Ingeneral, themore civilized and refinedthepeople, the less poetic are its morals everything weakens as it mellows.
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Time, matter, space - all, it may be, are no more than a point.
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Posterity for the philosopher is what the other world is for the religious man.
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Bad company is as instructive as licentiousness. One makes up for the loss of one's innocence with the loss of one's prejudices.
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You can be sure that a painter reveals himself in his work as much as and more than a writer does in his.
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In order to get as much fame as one's father one has to much more able than he.
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