Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes
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No man has any natural authority over his fellow men.
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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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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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In the North the first words are, Help me; in the South, Love me.
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L'offenseur ne pardonne jamais.1
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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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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?
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Every man has a right to risk his own life for the preservation of it.
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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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All that time is lost which might be better employed.
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Taste is, so to speak, the microscope of the judgment.
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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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Conscience is the voice of the soul, the passions are the voice of the body. Is it astonishing that often these two languages contradict each other, and then to which must we listen? Too often reason deceives us; we have only too much acquired the right of refusing to listen to it; but conscience never deceives us; it is the true guide of man; it is to man what instinct is to the body; which follows it, obeys nature, and never is afraid of going astray.
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But I am mistaken in speaking of a Christian republic; the terms are mutually exclusive. Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favorable to tyranny that it always profits by such a regime. True Christians are made to be slaves, and they know it and do not much mind; this short life counts for too little in their eyes.
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The French painter Rousseau was once asked why he put a naked woman on a red sofa in the middle of his jungle pictures. He answered, 'I needed a bit of red there.'
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The man who meditates is a depraved animal.
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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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Girls must be thwarted early in life.
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By doing good we become good.
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It is always a poor way of reading the hearts of others to try to conceal our own. [Fr., C'est toujours un mauvais moyen de lire dans le coeur des autres que d'affecter de cacher le sien.]
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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 tone of good conversation is brilliant and natural; it is neither tedious nor frivolous; it is instructive without pedantry, gay without tumultuousness, polished without affectation, gallant without insipidity, waggish without equivocation.
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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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A feeble body weakens the mind.