The infant runs toward it with its eyes closed, the adult is stationary, the old man approaches it with his back turned.
To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly. What a noble aim is that of the zealot who tortures himself like a madman in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing, and who, if he succeeded, would end up a complete monster!
It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it.
Good music is very close to primitive language.
Only a very bad theologian would confuse the certainty that follows revelation with the truths that are revealed. They are entirely different things.
Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it.
Power acquired by violence is only a usurpation, and lasts only as long as the force of him who commands prevails over that of those who obey.
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.
Only the bad man is alone.
The wisest among us is very lucky never to have met the woman, be she beautiful or ugly, intelligent or stupid, who could drive him crazy enough to be fit to be put into an asylum.
If ever anybody dedicated his whole life to the “enthusiasm for truth and justice” using this phrase in the good sense it was Diderot.
One may demand of me that I should seek truth, but not that I should find it.
You risk just as much in being credulous as in being suspicious.
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.
Philosophy is as far separated from impiety as religion is from fanaticism.
It is not the man who is beside himself, but he who is cool and collected, – who is master of his countenance, of his voice, of his actions, of his gestures, of every part of his play, – who can work upon others at his pleasure.
I like better for one to say some foolish thing upon important matters than to be silent. That becomes the subject of discussion and dispute, and the truth is discovered.
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.
One composition is meagre, though it has many figures; another is rich, though it has few.
Two qualities essential for the artist: moralityand perspective.