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 zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.
A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.
Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission.
No one's policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.
If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced.
The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.
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