Faith & Spirit Quote by Denis Diderot

Diderot is selling a dangerous fuel source: passion as both engine and alibi. In the Enlightenment, reason gets top billing, but Diderot - the great editor of the Encyclopedie, ringmaster of rational knowledge - slips in a corrective. He doesn’t deny intellect; he demotes it. You can catalog the world all you want, he implies, but nothing genuinely difficult gets built without the heat of desire, anger, love, ambition, or moral outrage pushing past comfort.

The phrasing is doing sly work. Not passions, but great passions. This is a gatekeeping adjective, and it’s the whole argument. Small wants produce small lives; moderation makes you polite, not consequential. "Elevate the soul" borrows spiritual language while staying secular enough to pass Enlightenment inspection. He’s not promising salvation. He’s promising scale. Elevation here is about capacity: the ability to attempt projects that would look irrational on a cost-benefit spreadsheet.

There’s also subtext from Diderot’s own career. Editing the Encyclopedie wasn’t a book project; it was a political act, harried by censorship and power. The line reads like self-justification for risk: only a big, consuming commitment can make you endure the grind, the backlash, the compromises. Passion becomes the respectable face of obsession.

It’s a romantic statement with an editor’s pragmatism underneath: history doesn’t move because people are sensible. It moves because some people are incandescent.