Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes
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There are always four sides to a story: your side, their side, the truth and what really happened.
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People in their natural state are basically good. But this natural innocence,however, is corrupted by the evils of society.
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Every man having been born free and master of himself, no one else may under any pretext whatever subject him without his consent. To assert that the son of a slave is born a slave is to assert that he is not born a man.
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The person who has lived the most is not the one with the most years but the one with the richest experiences.
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We can never put ourselves in the shoes of children; we cannot fathom their thoughts, we lend them ours; and always following ourown reasoning, we stuff their heads with extravagance and error.
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The abuse of books kills science. Believing that we know what we have read, we believe that we can dispense with learning it.
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Equality is deemed by many a mere speculative chimera, which can never be reduced to practice. But if the abuse is inevitable, does it follow that we ought not to try at least to mitigate it? It is precisely because the force of things tends always to destroy equality that the force of the legislature must always tend to maintain it.
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Cities are the abyss of the human species.
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Liberty may be gained, but can never be recovered.
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To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life.
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J.J. did not always flee from men, but he has always loved solitude. He enjoyed himself with the friends he velieved he had, but he enjoyed himself still more alone. He valued their society, but he sometimes needed to withdraw, and he would perhaps have preferred to live always alone than always with them.
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It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.
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Childhood is the sleep of reason.
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To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness.
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To live is not breathing it is action.
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Through the fortunate effect of my frankness, I had the rarest and surest opportunity to know a man well, which is to study him at leisure in his private life and living, so to speak, with himself. For he share himself without reservation and made me feel as much at home in his house as in mine. I had almost no other abode than his own.
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It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.
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As soon as any man says of the affairs of the State "What does it matter to me?" the State may be given up for lost.
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If there wasn't a God we would have to invent one to keep people sane.
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Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.
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Never exceed your rights, and they will soon become unlimited.
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It is as if my heart and my brain did not belong to the same person. Feelings come quicker than lightning and fill my soul, but they bring me no illumination; they burn me and dazzle me.
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Quit thy childhood, my friend, and wake up!
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I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.