"Diderot" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... great deal more—to explain what it does not explain—the Organism as a Whole, and thus to give a philosophical explanation of man. It even claims to afford hints for a rule for his life, at least so we gather from the Preface, where, alluding to "that group of freethinkers, including d'Alembert, Diderot, Holbach and Voltaire," the author tells us that they "first dared to follow the consequences of a mechanistic science—incomplete as it then was—to the rules of human conduct, and thereby laid the foundation of that spirit ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... above assigned to the Latin "praestigiae" (prestige, prestigiateur, -trice, prestigieux). The use of the word was not restricted to the prestige of prophets, conjurers, demons, but was transferred by analogy to delusions the cause of which is not regarded any longer as supernatural. Diderot actually makes mention of the prestige of harmony. The word "prestige" became transfigured, ennobled, and writers and orators refined it so as to make it applicable to analogies of the remotest character. Rousseau refers to the prestige of our passions, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... I could not recollect any one of them; and, at present, I much doubt whether I should be able entirely to go through one of those of which I was the most fond. All I distinctly recollect upon this occasion is, that on my arrival at Vincennes, I was in an agitation which approached a delirium. Diderot perceived it; I told him the cause, and read to him the prosopopoeia of Fabricius, written with a pencil under a tree. He encouraged me to pursue my ideas, and to become a competitor for the premium. I did so, and from ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... of letters at Paris:—'It would give you and Robertson great satisfaction to find that there is not a single deist among them.' J. H. Burton's Hume, ii. 181. There was no deist, I suppose, because they were all atheists. Romilly (Life, i. 179) records the following anecdote, which he had from Diderot in 1781:—'Hume dna avec une grande compagnie chez le Baron d'Holbach. Il tait assis ct du Baron; on parla de la religion naturelle. "Pour les Athes," disait Hume, "je ne crois pas qu'il en existe; je n'en ai jamais vu." "Vous avez t un peu malheureux," ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... the busts of democrats, in ordering the French Minister to remain away from Court, and in condemning any Russian who had dealings with him to be publicly flogged. Moreover, while thus drilling her own subjects, the quondam friend of Diderot kept her eyes fixed upon Warsaw. The shrewdest diplomatist of the age had already divined her aims, which he thus trenchantly summed up: "The Empress only waits to see Austria and Prussia committed in France, to overturn everything in Poland."[18] ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... 1751 Diderot published his "Lettre sur les Sourds et Muets," in which there is reference to the education ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... par Diderot, fils d'un Coutelier: un homme tres licentieux, qui ecrit encore plusieurs autres Ouvrages, comme La Religieuse, Les Bijoux mechant (sic), &c. Il jouit un grand role apres ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 238, May 20, 1854 • Various
... Virginian; Francis Fauquier, the lieutenant-governor of the province, said to be a fine scholar and elegant gentleman of the French school, who introduced into Virginia the writings of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot—as well as high play at cards; George Wythe, a rising lawyer of great abilities; John Burk,—the historian of Virginia; and lastly, Patrick Henry,—rough, jolly, and lazy. From such associates, all distinguished sooner or later, Jefferson ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... found in the "life of the hermits of the Thebaid," as it would be to say that its true logical outcome is to be found in those vehement assertions of nature—naked and unashamed—as its own sufficient warrant, which poured almost with the force of inspiration from the lips of Diderot. Both extremes are equally removed from that special moral temper and tone of feeling which we can alone call Christian—the former by its want of sympathy and tenderness, no less than the latter by its want of purity and self-command. Reassertion ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... presents us with the Bays, We prize the Praiser, not the Praise. We scarcely think our Fame eternal If vouched for by the Farthing Journal; But when the Craftsman's self has spoken, We take it for a certain Token. This an Example best will show, Derived from DENNIS DIDEROT. ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... evident to any one who compares the two French Encyclopaedias, which may be regarded as the exponents of the reigning philosophy of the two great revolutionary eras. The first, the Encyclopedie of D'Alembert, Voltaire, and Diderot, sought to malign and extirpate Christianity, while it did frequent homage to Natural Theology; the second, the "Nouvelle Encyclopedie" of Pierre Leroux and his coadjutors, proclaims the deification of Humanity, and ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... story was thus told by Diderot, to Sir Samuel Romilly, when a young man:—'Je vous dirai un trait de lui, mais il vous sera un peu scandaleux peut-etre, car vous autres Anglais, vous croyez un peu en Dieu; pour nous autres, nous n'y croyons gueres. Hume dina dans une grande compagnie avec le baron D'Holbach. ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... had the faculty of absorbing beautiful thoughts and sentiments, and no woman ever expressed them in a more graceful way. People said she was the greatest woman author of her day. "You mean of all time," corrected Diderot. They called her "the High Priestess of Letters," "the Minerva of Poetry," "Sappho Returned," and all that. Her commendation meant success and her indifference failure. She knew politics, too, and her hands were ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... Barrow; Leibnitz died in a chair with the 'Argenis' of Barclay in his hand; Kant, who never left his birthplace, Koenigsburg, had a weakness in the direction of books of travel. 'Were I to sell my library,' wrote Diderot, 'I would keep back Homer, Moses, and Richardson.' Sir W. Jones, like many other distinguished men, loved his Caesar. Chesterfield, agreeing with Callimachus, that 'a great book is a great ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... sometimes obtunded, if not altogether absent. Sallust, Seneca, and Bacon were suspected felons. Rousseau, Byron, Foscolo, and Caresa were grossly immoral, while Casanova, the gifted mathematician, was a common swindler. Murat, Rousseau, Clement, Diderot, Praga, and Oscar Wilde were ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... destiny, a writer, an author; you will be a philosopher; you will be one of the lights of the century, and your name will occupy a place in the annals of the nineteenth century, like those of Gassendi, Descartes, Malebranche, and Bacon in the seventeenth, and those of Diderot, Montesquieu, Helvetius. Locke, Hume, and Holbach in the eighteenth. Such will be your lot! Do now what you will, set type in a printing-office, bring up children, bury yourself in deep seclusion, seek obscure and lonely villages, it is all one to me; you cannot escape your ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... "After all, Diderot was in the right when he told Rousseau which side of the question to take," mused Cecil, as he crossed the barrack-yard a few minutes later to visit the incarcerated pratique. "On my life, civilization develops comfort, but I do believe it kills nobility. Individuality dies in it, ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... in whom the truth was always alive, but in whom it was then unperverted by suffering, by celebrity, and by despair, wrote in his study of Diderot: "Were it not reasonable to prophesy that this exceeding great multitude of novel-writers and such like must, in a new generation, gradually do one of two things: either retire into the nurseries, and work ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... probably proved its greatest calamity. Less than a hundred years after the Revocation, the Church had lost its influence over the people, and was despised. The Deists and Atheists, sprung from the Church's bosom, were in the ascendant; and Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and Mirabeau, were regarded as greater men than either Bossuet, ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... revolution were the disciples of Rousseau, Voltaire and Diderot. They were atheists, or infidels. Tom Paine was one of their number, participated in their deliberations, helped to get up the constitution they enacted. What they did is what the infidels of the United States wish ...
— The Christian Foundation, May, 1880
... and its effect upon color, and his charming handling of textures were comparatively unnoticed. Yet as a colorist he may be ranked second to none in French art, and in freshness of handling his work is a model for present-day painters. Diderot early recognized Chardin's excellence, and many artists since his day have admired his pictures; but he is not now a well-known or popular painter. The populace fancies Greuze and his sentimental heads of young girls. ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... houses in the Palais Royal where people dishonored themselves in the presence of their stern Catonian fathers, and its billets doux written at little gilt tables, and its coaches lumbering in covered with mud from the provinces through the Porte d'Orleans and the Porte de Versailles; the Paris of Diderot and Voltaire and Jean-Jacques, with its muddy streets and its ordinaries where one ate bisques and larded pullets and souffles; a Paris full of mouldy gilt magnificence, full of pompous ennui of the past and insane hope ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... I shall never be able to keep from driving the great wedge right through his breast and descending lower, from riveting his two foolish legs to the wintry chasm; for I that stammer and answer hap-hazard with you, get proportionately valiant and voluble with a mere cupful of Diderot's rinsings, and a man ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... whether an actor should feel his part or control his emotions, has been an argument which has interested the dramatic profession for many years, since it was first promulgated by the French writer Diderot, and afterwards ably discussed by Henry Irving and Coquelin. Of course, we all feel that no matter how violent the actor's stress of emotion is, he must control his resources with absolute restraint and poise. Sometimes, however, an actor feels he is under the sway of his part in ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... to whom such a considerable role is attributed, they hardly dealt with politics, excepting d'Holbach, a liberal monarchist like Voltaire and Diderot. They wrote chiefly in defence of individual liberty, opposing the encroachments of the Church, at that time extremely intolerant and inimical to philosophers. Being neither Socialists nor democrats, the Revolution could not utilise ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... part of the brain, we lose our minds; an operation upon a man's skull may transform him from a criminal into a reputable member of society. It is not easy for us to conceive how life can continue after the body dies. Diderot put the difficulty more than a century ago: "If you can believe in sight without eyes, in hearing without ears, in thinking without a head, if you could love without a heart, feel without senses, exist when you are nowhere ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... trashy and mouthing writers who adopted the sounding language of Johnson and Darwin, unenlivened by the vigorous thought of either; and the "dead-sea apes" of that inflated, sentimental, revolutionary style which Diderot had unconsciously originated, and Kotzebue carried beyond the verge of caricature. The right feeling and manly thought of Wordsworth were disgusted by these shallow word-mongers, and he flew to the other extreme. Under the influences—repulsive ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... controlled by theology. While in Europe, by a natural reaction, the colleges under strict ecclesiastical control have sent forth the most powerful foes the Christian Church has ever known, of whom Voltaire and Diderot and Volney and Sainte-Beuve and Renan are types, no such effects have been noted in these newer institutions. While the theological way of looking at the universe has steadily yielded, there has been no sign of any tendency toward irreligion. On the contrary, it is the testimony ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... eternal aspects of one and the same fact. Homo duplex, said the great Buffon: why not add Res duplex? Everything has two sides, even virtue. Hence Moliere always shows us both sides of every human problem; and Diderot, imitating him, once wrote, "This is not a mere tale"—in what is perhaps Diderot's masterpiece, where he shows us the beautiful picture of Mademoiselle de Lachaux sacrificed by Gardanne, side by side with that of a perfect lover dying for ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... Leah Delmotte Delorme, Marian Desmarets, Henri Despres, Josquin Devrient, Wilhelmine Schroeder Dickens, Charles Diderot, Denis Diehl, Alice Mangold Dies, Albert K. Droszdick, Baron von Dubufe, Edward Dubufe, Guillaume "Duchess," The Dudevant, Aurore (see Sand, George) ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... Do these pedantic books leave a single image or formula, a single new or striking fact behind them in the memory, when one puts them down? No; nothing but confusion and fatigue. Oh for clearness, terseness, brevity! Diderot, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... The Dawn of Skepticism: Bayle, J. B. Rousseau, Fontenelle, Lamotte.—2. Progress of Skepticism: Montesquieu, Voltaire. —3. French Literature during the Revolution: D'Holbach, D'Alembert, Diderot, J. J. Rousseau, Buffon, Beaumarchais, St. Pierre, and others. —4. French Literature under the Empire: Madame de Stael, Chateaubriand, Royer-Collard, Ronald, De Maistre.—5. French Literature from the Age of the Restoration to the ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... enthusiastic admiration of his theories. His romances misled many thousands, and were the most popular productions of his times. Though he and Voltaire were the exponents of French Deism, they were greatly aided in the dissemination of skeptical doctrines by Diderot, d'Alembert, Helvetius, d'Argent, de la Mettrie, and others. Bayle, in his Dictionary, appealed to the learned circles; and, not content to give only historical facts, he ventured upon the origination or reproduction of those new skeptical ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... fascinates the younger Robespierre—"He has so much of the future in his mind." But it is neither Toulon, nor Vendemiaire, nor Lodi, but the marshes of Arcola, two years after Robespierre has fallen on the scaffold, that reveal Napoleon to himself. So Diderot perceives the true bent of Rousseau's genius long before the Dijon essay reveals it to the latter himself and to France. Polybius discovers in the war of Regulus and of Mylae the beginning of Rome's imperial career, but a juster ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... crowded that evening with friends who came to remonstrate with her. She brought her most caustic wit into play. She said that as noble families could not produce a Moliere, a Racine, a Rousseau, a Voltaire, a Massillon, a Beaumarchais, or a Diderot, people must make up their minds to it, and accept the fact that great men had upholsterers and clockmakers and cutlers for their fathers. She said that genius was always noble. She railed at boorish squires ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... the poor girls who sell violets in the streets. He was wont to talk of those early days very freely,—passionately, even to tears, when he got excited,—and always bravely, heartily, and with the right "moral" to follow. When Diderot had passed a whole day without bread, he vowed that if he ever got prosperous, he would save any fellow-creature that he could from such suffering. Jerrold had learned the same lesson. Through life, he took the side of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... resided on his own estate near Geneva; Rousseau in the preceding year had been driven from his hermitage of Montmorency; and I blush at my having neglected to seek, in this journey, the acquaintance of Buffon. Among the men of letters whom I saw, D'Alembert and Diderot held the foremost rank in merit, or at least in fame. I shall content myself with enumerating the well-known names of the Count de Caylus, of the Abbe de la Bleterie, Barthelemy, Reynal, Arnaud, of Messieurs de ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... calculations the banker put forth as much intelligence and skill, finesse and mental power, as a practised diplomatist expends on national affairs. If he were equally remarkable outside his office, the banker would be a great man. Nucingen made one with the Prince de Ligne, with Mazarin or with Diderot, is a human formula that is almost inconceivable, but which has nevertheless been known as Pericles, Aristotle, Voltaire, and Napoleon. The splendor of the Imperial crown must not blind us to the merits of the individual; the Emperor was charming, ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... he cared little for Voltaire and Rousseau, and was unmoved even by Diderot, whose so greatly praised Salons he found strangely saturated with moralizing twaddle and futility; in his hatred toward all this balderdash, he limited himself almost exclusively to the reading of Christian eloquence, to the books of Bourdaloue and Bossuet whose sonorously ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... and finding himself still ignored, became a knight of the rueful countenance. Thoroughly equipped, adept enough in ancient tongues to appreciate Homer, a master of German and a fluent reader of French, a critic whose range stretched from Diderot to John Knox, he regarded his treatment as "tragically hard," exclaiming, "I could learn to do all things I have seen done, and am forbidden to try any of them." The efforts to keep the wolf from his own doors were harder than any but a few were till lately aware of. Landed ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... from the wings, directly in front of the first, who retired in the same measured manner. Now, if such a practice was well fitted to destroy all that is called illusion on the stage, it is the more striking, because it was done at a time when, according to Diderot's principles and examples, the most /natural naturalness/ was required upon the stage, and a perfect deception was proposed as the proper aim of theatrical art. Tragedy, however, was absolved from any such military-police regulations; and the heroes of antiquity had the right ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... better employed. Leaning gently on his favourite's arm, he began to tell him of his rapturous delight at having chanced upon a most astonishing discovery, a letter about the Academie from the Empress Catherine to Diderot, just in time for his forthcoming address to the Grand-Duke. He meant to read the letter at the meeting and perhaps to present his Highness, in the name of the Society, with the original in the handwriting ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... of mechanisms as an intellectual discipline most certainly had its origin on the left bank of the Seine, in this school spawned, as suggested by one French historian,[59] by the great Encyclopedie of Diderot and d'Alembert. ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson
... powerfully muscled, broad shouldered, robust of limbs, the head squat, the hair black and luxuriant, the mustache heavy, the eyes bright and penetrating, and his whole personality stamped with that southern-blooded zest that, in France, typifies the people of Provence. The philosopher Diderot has very aptly claimed that a man's bearing is the clue to his character, and this stocky little man was certainly a living proof of this claim. You could sense that his everyday conversation must have been packed with such vivid figures of speech as personification, symbolism, and misplaced ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... evolution of these to foster the growth of his religious sense. I can never feel quite sure that this teacher fully realised how deeply, and yet healthily, religious her children were. If she did not, I can but apply to her what Diderot said to David the painter, when the latter confessed that he had not intended to produce some artistic effect which the former had discovered in one of his pictures: "Quoi! c'est a votre insu? C'est encore mieux." To make children religious without intending to do so is a profoundly significant ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... Thiery, Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789), was the center of the radical wing of the philosophes. He was friend, host, and patron to a wide circle that included Diderot, D'Alembert, Helvetius, and Hume. Holbach wrote, translated, edited, and issued a stream of books and pamphlets, often under other names, that has made him the despair of bibliographers but has connected his name, by innuendo, gossip, and association, with most of what ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... Of Volney, Dupuis, Diderot, etc., we do not need to speak any more than of the physiocrats, now that we have shown the double derivation of French materialism from the physics of Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche and Leibnitz. This antagonism could only be realized by Germans ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... instances are striking examples of great age in dwarfs and are therefore of much interest. Borwilaski's parents were tall in stature and three of his brothers were small; three of the other children measured 5 feet 6 inches. Diderot has written a history ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... parties who took the literature of the century in earnest; they thought that the hour had struck for translating, one of them, the sentimentalism of Rousseau, the other of them, the rationality of Voltaire and Diderot, into terms of politics that should form the basis of a new social life. The strife between the faction of Robespierre and the faction of Chaumette was the reproduction, under the shadow of the guillotine, of the great literary strife of a quarter ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... intellectual world? French writers have kept Europe in the path of analysis and philosophical criticism from age to age by their powerful style and the original turn given by them to ideas.' Here, for the benefit of the philistine, insert a panegyric on Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, and Buffon. Hold forth upon the inexorable French language; show how it spreads a varnish, as it were, over thought. Let fall a few aphorisms, such as—'A great writer in France is invariably a great man; he writes in a language which compels him ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... Diderot, Denis.—An Essay on Blindness, etc. Interspersed with several anecdotes of Sanderson, Milton, and others. Translated from the ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... Tractarian. The 'Life of Sterling' is the favourite book of many who would sooner pick oakum than read 'Frederick the Great' all through; whilst the mere student of belles lettres may attach importance to the essays on Johnson, Burns, and Scott, on Voltaire and Diderot, on Goethe and Novalis, and yet remain blankly indifferent to 'Sartor Resartus' and ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell |
