Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes
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We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man's estate, is the gift of education.
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There are two things to be considered with regard to any scheme. In the first place, Is it good in itself? In the second, Can it be easily put into practice?
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It is unnatural for a majority to rule, for a majority can seldom be organized and united for specific action, and a minority can.
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The man is best served who has no occasion to put the hands of others at the end of his own arms.
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To make a man richer, give him more money of curb his desires.
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To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.
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He thinks like a philosopher, but governs like a king.
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Heroes are not known by the loftiness of their carriage; the greatest braggarts are generally the merest cowards.
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Ruthless man: you begin by slaying the animal and then you devour it, as if to slay it twice. It is not enough. You turn against the dead flesh, it revolts you, it must be transformed by fire, boiled and roasted, seasoned and disguised with drugs; you must have butchers, cooks, turnspits, men who will rid the murder of its horrors, who will dress the dead bodies so that the taste decieved by these disguises will not reject what is strange to it, and will feast on corpses, the very sight of which would sicken you.
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The man who meditates is a depraved animal.
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Social man lives constantly outside himself.
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The animals you eat are not those who devour others; you do not eat the carnivorous beasts, you take them as your pattern. You only hunger for the sweet and gentle creatures which harm no one, which follow you, serve you, and are devoured by you as the reward of their service.
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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.
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The mind grows narrow in proportion as the soul grows corrupt.
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I had been brought up in a church which decides everything and permits no doubts, so that having rejected one article of faith I was forced to reject the rest.
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Men, in general, are not this or that, they are what they are made to be.
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I may be no better, but at least I am different.
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I am not made like any of those I have seen. I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different.
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Each member of the community gives himself to it at the instant of its constitution, just as he actually is, himself and all his forces, including all goods in his possession.
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In truth, laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to those who have nothing; from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all possess something and none has too much.
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I will say little of the importance of a good education; nor will I stop to prove that the current one is bad. Countless others have done so before me, and I do not like to fill a book with things everybody knows. I will note that for the longest time there has been nothing but a cry against the established practice without anyone taking it upon himself to propose a better one. The literature and the learning of our age tend much more to destruction than to edification.
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Days of absence, sad and dreary,Clothed in sorrow's dark array,-Days of absence, I am weary: She I love is far away.
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For it is in our nature to endure patiently the decrees of fate, but not the ill-will of others.
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By doing good we become good.