Denis Diderot Quotes

Those things interest me a lot in songwriting - the human nature of how people think, and the muck that we wind up in.

The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.

The heart of man is made to reconcile the most glaring contradictions.

Pleasure and pain, though directly opposite, are yet so contrived by nature as to be constant companions; and it is a fact that the same motions and muscles of the face are employed both in laughing and crying.

Do you know my friend that each one of us is a dark mystery, a maze of conflicting passions and desire and aptitudes?

Love, desire, ambition, faith - without them, life's so simple, believe me.

The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers.

Things are never simple when it comes to the human heart.

Movies can provide tear-inducing or comically-entertaining representations of love, but many agree that its deeper conflicting complexities often seem unfathomable.

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

Man is born passionate of body, but with an innate though secret tendency to the love of Good in his main-spring of Mind. But God help us all! It is at present a sad jar of atoms.

It is a great pity but tis certain from every day's observation of man, that he may be set on fire like a candle, at either end provided there is a sufficient wick standing out.

One declaims endlessly against the passions; one imputes all of man's suffering to them. One forgets that they are also the source of all his pleasures.

Man is to be found in reason, God in the passions.

Sometimes I am happy and sometimes not. I am, after all, a human being, you know. And I am glad that we are sometimes happy and sometimes not. You get your wisdom working by having different emotions.

The questions of philosophy proper are human desires and fears and aspirations - human emotions - taking an intellectual form.

It is impossible not to notice that our world is tormented by failure, hate, guilt, and fear.

For me, I start at the place that my characters are human. I start at the place that they are onions that are layered and meant to be peeled, just as we as human beings are.

We're just kind of dark as humans, generally.

The heart of man ever finds a constant succession of passions, so that the destroying and pulling down of one proves generally tobe nothing else but the production and the setting up of another.

Man... knows only when he is satisfied and when he suffers, and only his sufferings and his satisfactions instruct him concerning himself, teach him what to seek and what to avoid. For the rest, man is a confused creature; he knows not whence he comes or whither he goes, he knows little of the world, and above all, he knows little of himself.

Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering.

In the human heart one generation of passions follows another; from the ashes of one springs the spark of the next.

Even in the midst of compassion we feel within I know not what tart sweet titillation of malicious pleasure in seeing others suffer; children have the same feeling.