Denis Diderot Quotes

Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.

To talk about the need for perfection in man is to talk about the need for another species. The essence of man is imperfection. Imperfection and blazing contradictions-between mixed good and evil, altruism and selfishness, cooperativeness and combativeness, optimism and fatalism, affirmation and negation.

We are not consistent. We have both these dark sides and some light as well.

Of course, we're all a mass of contradictions.

I'm trying to get at something a little transcendent between humans. But at the same time, there's all that baggage: What's beautiful about humans is what's balanced by what's kind of ugly and petty and depressing.

It's the murkiness of humanity that I find endlessly fascinating.

There is some good in the worst of us, and some evil in the best of us.

A book is like a man - clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly.

There is no light without shadow, and no psychic wholeness without imperfection.

No motive is pure. No one is good or bad-but a hearty mix of both. And sometimes life actually gives to you by taking away.

I'm full of contradictions.

I think I'm a combination of very simple pleasures and the fact I've read a lot of books. I don't think it's a binary opposition across the board in humans and I think I'm an example that it's not. I'm hosting gay marriage rallies and I have tons of guns at home. There's a lot of middle ground in the world and I'm one of those people.

I don't think there are in life, pure darkness or pure light. Everyone's got a little of everything.

Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions.

Man has always been half-monster, half-dreamer.

We’re built of contradictions, all of us. It’s those opposing forces that give us strength, like an arch, each block pressing the next. Give me a man whose parts are all aligned in agreement and I’ll show you madness. We walk a narrow path, insanity to each side. A man without contradictions to balance him will soon veer off.

Poor humanity!--so dependent, so insignificant, and yet so great.

We find the vast majority of people in every country believing that there will be a time when this world will become perfect, when there will be no disease, nor death, nor unhappiness, nor wickedness. That is a very good idea, a very good motive power to inspire and uplift the ignorant. But if we think for a moment, we shall find on the very face of it that it cannot be so. How can it be, seeing that good and evil are the obverse and reverse of the same coin? How can you have good without evil at the same time?

For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly.

Human nature seems to me like the Alps. The depths are profound, black as night, and terrifying, but the heights are equally real, uplifted in the sunshine.

A man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once.

Yes. The way people behave, the paradoxes, the contradictions. All these things we have to live with and still pretend that everything is only black or white. That, I think, is the most interesting thing in human nature. The fact that we have to do one thing and pretend something else. That’s when it becomes very interesting. If you can literally speak the way you feel, then it’s not interesting anymore. It’s when you have to lie that it becomes interesting.

Good Lord, what is man! for as simple he looks, Do but try to develop his books and his crooks, With his depths and his shallows, his good and his evil, All in all, he's a problem must puzzle the devil.

In every age and every man there is something to praise as well as to blame.

When I define polarities in my work, I actually create the space between things. I point to the question I am actually interested in, without naming it.