Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes
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I long remained a child, and I am still one in many respects.
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To renounce freedom is to renounce one's humanity, one's rights as a man and equally one's duties.
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The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it.
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Education is either from nature, from man or from things. The developing of our faculties and organs is the education of nature; that of man is the application we learn to make of this very developing; and that of things is the experience we acquire in regard to the different objects by which we are affected. All that we have not at our birth, and that we stand in need of at the years of maturity, is the gift of education.
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I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.
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Inopportune consolations increase a deep sorrow.
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Once you teach people to say what they do not understand, it is easy enough to get them to say anything you like.
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There is no folly of which a man who is not a fool cannot get rid except vanity; of this nothing cures a man except experience of its bad consequences, if indeed anything can cure it.
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Women speak at an earlier age, more easily, and more agreeably than men; they are accused also of speaking more; this is as it should be, and I willingly change the reproach into a eulogy.
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Take from the philosopher the pleasure of being heard and his desire for knowledge ceases.
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Frequent punishments are always a sign of weakness or laziness on the part of a government.
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The truth brings no man a fortune.
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Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.
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We should not teach children the sciences; but give them a taste for them.
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We are born, so to speak, twice over; born into existence, and born into life; born a human being, and born a man.
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Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls.
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There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character.
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Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.
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People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.
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He who pretends to look on death without fear lies. All men are afraid of dying, this is the great law of sentient beings, without which the entire human species would soon be destroyed.
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It is to law alone that men owe justice and liberty. It is this salutary organ, of the will of all which establishes in civil rights the natural equality between men. It is this celestial voice which dictates to each citizen the precepts of public reason, and teaches him to act according to the rules of his own judgment and not to behave inconsistently with himself. It is with this voice alone that political leaders should speak when. they command.
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I have entered on an enterprise which is without precedent, and will have no imitator. I propose to show my fellows a man as nature made him, and this man shall be myself.
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Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?
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Taste is, so to speak, the microscope of the judgment.