Denis Diderot Quotes

Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity — distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless

The intellectual power is never at rest; it is never satisfied with any comprehended truth, but ever proceeds on and on towards that truth which is not comprehended. So also the will, which follows the apprehension; we see that it is never satisfied with anything finite.

Some fighters know when to stop on their own and go on to something else, and then some fighters have nothing to go back to after they are finished. Some fighters still have the burning fire and feel that they just need to try one more time. Few can do it.

Human folly does not impede the turning of the stars.

There is no better story in the Old Testament, or perhaps the whole Bible, for depicting the difference between the ladder-defined life and the cross-defined life than that of the Tower of Babel.

There is a tragic kind of joke. You really can't keep a man down - good but often otherwise - because history's mechanics are built to keep him climbing toward the top. Somehow, Icarus gets to be reborn as Iron Man.

In a sermon entitled “God's Providence,” C. H. Spurgeon said, “Napoleon once heard it said, that man proposes and God disposes. 'Ah,' said Napoleon, 'but I propose and dispose too.' How do you think he proposed and disposed? He proposed to go and take Russia; he proposed to make all Europe his. He proposed to destroy that power, and how did he come back again? How had he disposed it? He came back solitary and alone, his mighty army perished and wasted, having well-nigh eaten and devoured one another through hunger. Man proposes and God disposes.

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.

It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky. It is the part of creation in which nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man.

Lustre of man walking proud beneath the sky diminishes to nothing and goes unregarded.

I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I can not appropriate the snow field where i slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat.

It has always irked me as improper that there are still so many people for whom the sky is no more than a mass of random points of light. I do not see why we should recognize a house, a tree, or a flower here below and not, for example, the red Arcturus up there in the heavens as it hangs from its constellation Bootes, like a basket hanging from a balloon.

The city buildings in the distance are holding up the sky, it seems.

The thirst for the Infinite proves infinity.

You can try to steal the thunder all you want, it just reminds people I'm the lightning. You rumble in the distance. I light up the sky.

Because no other could do it, he himself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this incomparable agony, this marvel of love, is the crucifixion. Nothing can be further from God than that which has been made accursed.

The mountain at a given distance In amber lies; Approached, the amber flits a little,-- And that's the skies!

Ambition wants us to improve our lot, basically, but I can't help thinking we're pursuing a return to a technological Eden. We do try to create a paradise on Earth, because we are hubristic and we want to surpass this notion of God and then ourselves become gods.

Moved by a passion they do not understand for a goal they seldom reach, men and women are haunted by the vision of a distant possibility that refuses to be extinguished.

You do not reach the sublime by degrees; the distance between it and the merely beautiful is infinite.

You live in a tower that soars to heaven and goes unpunished by God.

Nothing is too high for the daring of mortals: we storm heaven itself in our folly.

No matter how far apart we are, don't forget that we're still under the same sky, both traveling to the place we once dreamed of.

Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.