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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.

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
Moral
Less
Sont
Everything
Tout
Weakens
Morals
Poetic
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More quotes by Denis Diderot

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When shall we see poets born? After a time of disasters and great misfortunes, when harrowed nations begin to breathe again. And then, shaken by the terror of such spectacles, imaginations will paint things entirely strange to those who have not witnessed them.
Denis Diderot
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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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To describe women, the pen should be dipped in the humid colors of the rainbow, and the paper dried with the dust gathered from the wings of a butterfly.
Denis Diderot
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There are cats and cats.
Denis Diderot
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In order to get as much fame as one's father one has to much more able than he.
Denis Diderot
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Only God and some few rare geniuses can keep forging ahead into novelty.
Denis Diderot
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Time, matter, space - all, it may be, are no more than a point.
Denis Diderot
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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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Evil always turns up in this world through some genius or other.
Denis Diderot
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If you disturb the colors of the rainbow, the rainbow is no longer beautiful.
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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In general, children, like men, and men, like children, prefer entertainment to education.
Denis Diderot
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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.
Denis Diderot
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Those authors into whose hands nature has placed a magic wand, with which they no sooner touch us than we forget the unhappiness in life, than the darkness leaves our soul, and we are reconciled to existence, should be placed among the benefactors of the human race.
Denis Diderot
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Justice is the first virtue of those who command, and stops the complaints of those who obey.
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.
Denis Diderot
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Isn't it better to have men being ungrateful than to miss a chance to do good?
Denis Diderot
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They mistake the first manifestations of a developing sexual nature for the voice of God calling them to Himself and it is precisely when nature is inciting them that they embrace a fashion of life contrary to nature's wish.
Denis Diderot
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No man has received from nature the right to command his fellow human beings.
Denis Diderot
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There is no good father who would want to resemble our Heavenly Father.
Denis Diderot