Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes
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It is not possible for minds degraded by a host of trivial concerns to ever rise to anything great.
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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?
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In the North the first words are, Help me; in the South, Love me.
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All that time is lost which might be better employed.
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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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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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Le remords s'endort durant un destin prospère et s'aigrit dans l'adversité.
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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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Girls must be thwarted early in life.
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The man who meditates is a depraved animal.
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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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I may be no better, but at least I am different.
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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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A feeble body weakens the mind.
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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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By doing good we become good.
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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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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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Rather suffer an injustice than commit one.
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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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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 have always said and felt that true enjoyment can not be described.
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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.