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With children use force; with men reason; such is the natural order of things. The wise man requires no law.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau -
If I am part of a group of 100 people, do 99 people have the right to sentence me to death, just because they are majority?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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Behold the works of our philosophers; with all their pompous diction, how mean and contemptible they are by comparison with the Scriptures! Is it possible that a book at once so simple and sublime should be merely the work of man?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau -
The man is best served who has no occasion to put the hands of others at the end of his own arms.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau -
The members of a body-politic call it "the state" when it is passive, "the sovereign" when it is active, and a "power" when they compare it with others of its kind. Collectively they use the title "people," and they refer to one another individually as "citizens" when speaking of their participation in the authority of the sovereign, and as "subjects" when speaking of their subordination to the laws of the state.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau -
At sixteen, the adolescent knows about suffering because he himself has suffered, but he barely knows that other beings also suffer.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau -
At Genoa, the word Liberty may be read over the front of the prisons and on the chains of the galley-slaves. This application of the device is good and just. It is indeed only malefactors of all estates who prevent the citizen from being free. In the country in which all such men were in the galleys, the most perfect liberty would be enjoyed.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau -
The indifference of children towards meat is one proof that the taste for meat is unnatural; their preference is for vegetable foods...Beware of changing this natural taste and making children flesh-eaters, if not for their health's sake, for the sake of their character; for how can one explain away the fact that great meat-eaters are usually fiercer and more cruel than other men; this has been recognised at all times and in all places.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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Whatever may be our natural talents, the art of writing is not acquired all at once.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau -
Watch a cat when it enters a room for the first time. It searches and smells about, it is not quiet for a moment, it trusts nothing until it has examined and made acquaintance with everything.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau -
Patience patience quotes is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau -
We do not know what really good or bad fortune is.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau -
The truths of the Scriptures are so marked and inimitable, that the inventor would be more of a miraculous character than the hero.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau -
My bad head cannot adjust itself to the way things are.... If I want to depict spring, it has to be in wintertime; if I want to describe a beautiful landscape, I must be enclosed within walls; and I have said a hundred times that if I were put in the Bastille, there I would paint a picture of liberty.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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It is not our criminal actions that require courage to confess, but those which are ridiculous and foolish.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau -
Let the trumpet of the day of judgment sound when it will, I shall appear with this book in my hand before the Sovereign Judge, and cry with a loud voice, This is my work, there were my thoughts, and thus was I. I have freely told both the good and the bad, have hid nothing wicked, added nothing good.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau -
Girls must be thwarted early in life.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau -
As evening approached, I came down from the heights of the island, and I liked then to go and sit on the shingle in some secluded spot by the lake; there the noise of the waves and the movement of the water, taking hold of my senses and driving all other agitation from my soul, would plunge me into delicious reverie in which night often stole upon me unawares.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau -
[When anything happens, we interpret it as good or bad, but...] We do not know what is really good or bad fortune. [Only the future can decide. For example, what appears to be bad today may in fact lead us to a greater good tomorrow and by the very act of thinking and planning in that positive way, we can help make that good future come true.]
Jean-Jacques Rousseau -
There is a period of life when we go back as we advance. [Fr., Il est un terme de la vie au-dela duquel en retrograde en avancant.]
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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Definitions would be good things if we did not use words to make them.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau -
The empire of woman is an empire of softness, of address, of complacency. Her commands are caresses, her menaces are tears.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau -
I love idleness. I love to busy myself about trifles, to begin a hundred things and not finish one of them, to come and go as my fancy bids me, to change my plan every moment, to follow a fly in all its circlings, to try and uproot a rock to see what is underneath, eagerly to begin a ten-years' task to give it up after ten minutes: in short, to fritter away the whole day inconsequentially and incoherently, and to follow nothing but the whim of the moment.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau -
I don't know what is truth,but I can tell you how to find it!
Jean-Jacques Rousseau