Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes
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We are reduced to asking others what we are. We never dare to ask ourselves.
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An honest man nearly always thinks justly.
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Chère amie, ne savez-vous pas que la vertu est un état de guerre, et que, pour y vivre, on a toujours quelque combat à rendre contre soi?
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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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Heroes are not known by the loftiness of their carriage; the greatest braggarts are generally the merest cowards.
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The money that we possess is the instrument of liberty, that which we lack and strive to obtain is the instrument of slavery.
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O love, if I regret the age when one savors you, it is not for the hour of pleasure, but for the one that follows it.
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An intelligent being, is the active principle of all things. One must have renounced all common sense to doubt it, and it is a waste of time to try to prove such self evident truth.
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Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.
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The science of government is only a science of combinations, of applications, and of exceptions, according to times, places and circumstances.
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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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Teach him to live rather than to avoid death: life is not breath, but action, the use of our senses, our mind, our faculties, every part of ourselves which makes us conscious of our being. Life consists less in length of days than in the keen sense of living. A man maybe buried at a hundred and may never have lived at all. He would have fared better had he died young.
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Generally we obtain very surely and very speedily what we are not too anxious to obtain.
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To make a man richer, give him more money of curb his desires.
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God is intelligent; but in what manner? Man is intelligent by the act of reasoning, but the supreme intelligence lies under no necessity to reason. He requires neither premise nor consequences; nor even the simple form of a proposition. His knowledge is purely intuitive. He beholds equally what is and what will be. All truths are to Him as one idea, as all places are but one point, and all times one moment.
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It is easier to conquer than to administer. With enough leverage, a finger could overturn the world; but to support the world, one must have the shoulders of Hercules.
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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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Social man lives constantly outside himself.
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By doing good we become good.
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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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If all were perfect Christians, individuals would do their duty; the people would be obedient to the laws, the magistrates incorrupt, and there would be neither vanity nor luxury in such a state.
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Gratitude is a duty which ought to be paid, but which none have a right to expect.
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The mind grows narrow in proportion as the soul grows corrupt.
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Conscience is the voice of the soul, the passions are the voice of the body. It is strange that these voices often contradict each other?