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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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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
Grand
Scale
Scales
Poetry
Needs
Barbarous
Something
Savage
Savages
Chose

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There's a bit of testicle at the bottom of our most sublime feelings and our purest tenderness.
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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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We are far more liable to catch the vices than the virtues of our associates.
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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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When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.
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No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a gift from heaven, and every individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he is in enjoyment of his reason.
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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.
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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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Skepticism is the first step on the road to philosophy.
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A nation which thinks that it is belief in God and not good law which makes people honest does not seem to me very advanced.
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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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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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There is less harm to be suffered in being mad among madmen than in being sane all by oneself.
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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.
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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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Le public ne sait pas toujours de sirer le vrai. Thepublicdoesnot alwaysknowhow todesirethetruth.
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Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world.
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I discuss with myself questions of politics, love, taste, or philosophy. I let my mind rove wantonly, give it free rein to followany idea, wise or mad that may present itself. My ideas are my harlots.
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Posterity for the philosopher is what the other world is for the religious man.
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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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