Denis Diderot Quotes

We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do.

Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow.

She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust.

No one loses any other life than the one he now lives, nor does one live any other life than that which he will lose.

The body is not important. It is made of dust; it is made of ashes. It is food for the worms. The winds and the waters dissolve it and scatter it to the four corners of the earth. In the end, what we care most for only lasts a brief lifetime, and then there is eternity. Time forever. Millions of worlds are born, evolve, and pass away into nebulous, unmeasured skies; and there is still eternity. Time always. The body becomes dust and trees and exploding fire, it becomes gaseous and disappears, and still there is eternity. Silent, unopposed, brooding, forever.

Insignificant mortals, who are as leaves are, and now flourish and grow warm with life, and feed on what the ground gives, but then again fade away and are dead.

A human being is only breath and shadow.

Our lives feel like these epochs, but really, we are dust in the wind.

A mass of dust, world's momentary slave, Is man, in state of our old Adam made, Soon born to die, soon flourishing to fade.

Time hurries by, we're here and gone.

We are born, we live, we disappear. One of the chilling aspects of history is the swiftness with which it carries us into oblivion.

Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone.

We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn't matter so much as it seemed to do - it's not so burningly important, after all, what happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesn't matter so much.

We are tiny flames, Helikaon, and we flicker alone in the great dark for no more than a heartbeat. When we strive for wealth, glory and fame, it is meaningless. The nations we fight for will one day cease to be. Even the mountains we gaze upon will crumble to dust. To truly live we must yearn for that which does not die.

One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, "I will always be here."

We look at mountains and call them eternal, and they seem... but in the course of time, mountains rise and fall, rivers change their courses, starts fall from the sky, and great cities sink beneath the sea. Even gods die, we think. Everything changes.

eventually, everything goes away.

Mean and mighty, rotting Together, have one dust.

We're all vanishing organisms and disappearing creatures in space and time - that death sentence in space in time that Kafka talked about with such profundity.

Our life is our own to-day, to-morrow you will be dust, a shade, and a tale that is told. Live mindful of death; the hour flies.

The plain truth is we are going to die. Here I am, a teeny spec surrounded by boundless space and time, arguing with the whole of creation, shaking my fist, sputtering, growing even eloquent at times, and then-poof! I am gone. Swept off once and for all. I think that is very, very funny.

Some men spend their whole life furnishing for themselves the things proper to life without realizing that at our birth each of us was poured a mortal brew to drink.

Look what a little vain dust we are!