People praise virtue, but they hate it, they run away from it. It freezes you to death, and in this world you've got to keep your feet warm.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the contradiction between society's admiration for virtue and its aversion to the sacrifices that true virtue demands.
Denis Diderot's quote reflects the paradox that while people often extol the value of virtue, they simultaneously resist its practice due to the discomfort and challenges it can impose. He suggests that virtue can be isolating and strenuous, akin to being 'frozen', and in a world where survival and comfort are prioritized, people may choose to abandon virtuous paths to maintain their warmth and humanity.
In practice
During a speech on ethics, one might use this quote to emphasize the struggle between doing what is right and the pressures of societal norms.
The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid.
This root [the potato], no matter how much you prepare it, is tasteless and floury. It cannot pass for an agreeable food, but it supplies a food sufficiently abundant and sufficiently healthy for men who ask only to sustain themselves. The potato is criticized with reason for being windy, but what matters windiness for the vigorous organisms of peasants and laborers?
Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world.
There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge... observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.
In order to get as much fame as one's father one has to much more able than he.
All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs.
The point is not to completely understand God but to worship Him. Let the very fact that you cannot know Him fully lead you to praise Him for His infiniteness and grandeur.
In a sense, words are encyclopedias of ignorance because they freeze perceptions at one moment in history and then insist we continue to use these frozen perceptions when we should be doing better.
The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.
There are no prescriptive solutions, no grand designs for grand problems. Life's solutions lie in the minute particulars involving more and more individual people daring to create their own life and art, daring to listen to the voice within their deepest, original nature, and deeper still, the voice within the earth.
In just the same way the thousands of successive positions of a runner are contracted into one sole symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives, which art reproduces, and which becomes for everyone the image of a man who runs.
How strange it is that people of honest feelings and sensibilty, who would not take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyesβhow such people think nothing of abusing a man with low intelligence.
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