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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.

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
Better
Men
Astray
Guides
Instinct
Intelligence
Pure
Animal
Reason

More quotes by Denis Diderot

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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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What is a monster? A being whose survival is incompatible with the existing order.
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Are we not madder than those first inhabitants of the plain of Sennar? We know that the distance separating the earth from the sky is infinite, and yet we do not stop building our tower.
Denis Diderot
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If the weather is too cold or rainy, I take shelter in the Regence Cafe, where I entertain myself by watching chess being played. Paris is the world center, and this cafe is the Paris centre for the finest skill at this game.
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Anyone who takes it upon himself, on his private authority, to break a bad law, thereby authorizes everyone else to break the good ones.
Denis Diderot
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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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Gaiety is a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.
Denis Diderot
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You have to make it happen.
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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How easy it is to tell tales!
Denis Diderot
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My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.
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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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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There is only one passion, the passion for happiness.
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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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.
Denis Diderot
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The blood of Jesus Christ can cover a multitude of sins, it seems to me.
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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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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All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings.
Denis Diderot