Denis Diderot Quotes

If you be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams - the more they are condensed the deeper they burn.

It is with words as with sunbeams - the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.

I have found that there are moments when someone uses language that sears itself into the head [of the listener]. Those are the moments I look for.

Don't you go believing in sayings … they are all made by men, for their own advantages.

The excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare or abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some useful truth in a few words.

The apothegm is the most portable form of Truth.... It is thus that the proverb answers where the sermon fails, as a well-charged pistol will do more execution than a whole barrel of gunpowder idly expended in the air.

Truth: An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance …

A falsehood in which some truth is not stated at the beginning, cannot be maintained in the end.

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it..

Accent [emphasis] is the soul of speech; it gives it feeling and truth.

Once you can express yourself, you can tell the world what you want from it. All the changes in the world, for good or evil, were first brought about by words.

Platitudes are safe, because they're easy to wink at, but truth is something else again.

As in the infirmity of human nature, no man's actions are always what he likes to look back upon, as there are points in which he would wish that he had acted otherwise; so every man who tells his own story is under a temptation more or less to disguise the truth; and the more in proportion as his actions have been upon a larger scale, and his faults or mistakes therefore have been more flagrant.

If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth the reading, or do things worth the writing.

I'm obsessed with proverbs because, to me, flexing is being able to say the most with the least amount of words.

I've got an awful memory, and I can't read or write, but you can read me a script once or twice, and I've got it.

Don't write slogans, write truths.

Whoever writes in blood and aphorisms wants not to be learned but to be learned by heart.

I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically.

The existence of the writer is to write, and to write is to tell the truth.

It has forever been thus: So long as men write what they think, then all of the other freedoms - all of them - may remain intact. And it is then that writing becomes a weapon of truth, an article of faith, an act of courage.

If what you write is true, it will not be so because of what you are as a writer but because of what you are as a being. There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

On my tombstone, I really hope that someday they will write: He was true but partial.

Read critically, write consciously; speak clearly; tell your truth!

Truth is more of a stranger than fiction. When in doubt, tell the truth. If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything. Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use.