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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.

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
Firsts
Generally
Touchstone
First
Step
Touchstones
Must
Toward
Scepticism
Thing
Steps
Questioned
Never
Gone
Applied
Religion
Proved
Truth
Hence
Ever
Properly
Impartially

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My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.
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And his hands would plait the priest's entrails, For want of a rope, to strangle kings.
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Superstition is more injurious to God than atheism.
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Only God and some few rare geniuses can keep forging ahead into novelty.
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In general, children, like men, and men, like children, prefer entertainment to education.
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Le public ne sait pas toujours de sirer le vrai. Thepublicdoesnot alwaysknowhow todesirethetruth.
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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.
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Every man has his dignity. I'm willing to forget mine, but at my own discretion and not when someone else tells me to.
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From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.
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Skepticism is the first step on the road to philosophy.
Denis Diderot
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All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings.
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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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All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings... We must run roughshod over all these ancient puerilities, overturn the barriers that reason never erected, give back to the arts and sciences the liberty that is so precious to them.
Denis Diderot
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Two qualities essential for the artist: moralityand perspective.
Denis Diderot
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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.
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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.
Denis Diderot
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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 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.
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Jacques said that his master said that everything good or evil we encounter here below was written on high.
Denis Diderot
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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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