Denis Diderot Religious Quotations

It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley, but to believe or not believe in God is not important at all.

The man who first pronounced the barbarous word God ought to have been immediately destroyed.

The Christian religion teaches us to imitate a God that is cruel, insidious, jealous, and implacable in his wrath.

There comes a moment during which almost every girl or boy falls into melancholy; they are tormented by a vague inquietude which rests on everything and finds nothing to calm it. They seek solitude; they weep; the silence to be found in cloister attracts them: the image of peace that seems to reign in religious houses seduces them. They mistake the first manifestations of a developing sexual nature for the voice of God calling them to Himself; and it is precisely when nature is inciting them that they embrace a fashion of life contrary to nature's wish.

But if you will recall the history of our civil troubles, you will see half the nation bathe itself, out of piety, in the blood of the other half, and violate the fundamental feelings of humanity in order to sustain the cause of God: as though it were necessary to cease to be a man in order to prove oneself religious!

Posterity for the philosopher is what the other world is for the religious man.