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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

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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
Soul
Return
Infancy
Without
Becomes
Returns
Great
Virtue
Morals
Things
Either
Minded
Small
Passions
Passion
Raise
Moral
Raises
Art
Creativity
Sublimity

More quotes by Denis Diderot

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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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The world is the house of the strong.
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Gratitude is a burden, and every burden is made to be shaken off.
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Integrity is the evidence of all civil virtues.
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What is a monster? A being whose survival is incompatible with the existing order.
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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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My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.
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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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There is only one passion, the passion for happiness.
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If there are one hundred thousand damned souls for one saved soul, the devil has always the advantage without having given up his son to death.
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Time, matter, space - all, it may be, are no more than a point.
Denis Diderot
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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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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
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And his hands would plait the priest's entrails, For want of a rope, to strangle kings.
Denis Diderot
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We are far more liable to catch the vices than the virtues of our associates.
Denis Diderot
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There are cats and cats.
Denis Diderot
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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
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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
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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.
Denis Diderot
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Which is the greater merit, to enlighten the human race, which remains forever, or to save one's fatherland, which is perishable?
Denis Diderot