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First of all move me, surprise me, rend my heart make me tremble, weep, shudder outrage me delight my eyes afterwards if you can.

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
Moving
Weep
Firsts
Afterwards
First
Delight
Heart
Surprise
Make
Move
Rend
Emotion
Shudder
Eyes
Tremble
Eye
Outrage

More quotes by Denis Diderot

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My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.
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In general, children, like men, and men, like children, prefer entertainment to education.
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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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The blood of Jesus Christ can cover a multitude of sins, it seems to me.
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Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
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How easy it is to tell tales!
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Only God and some few rare geniuses can keep forging ahead into novelty.
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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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Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world.
Denis Diderot
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He whom we call a gentleman is no longer the man of Nature.
Denis Diderot
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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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Good music is very close to primitive language.
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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 are cats and cats.
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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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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.
Denis Diderot
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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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Only a very bad theologian would confuse the certainty that follows revelation with the truths that are revealed. They are entirely different things.
Denis Diderot
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I can be expected to look for truth but not to find it.
Denis Diderot
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Two qualities essential for the artist: moralityand perspective.
Denis Diderot