“My love for imaginary objects and my facility in lending myself to them ended by disillusioning me with everything around me, and determined that love of solitude which I have retained ever since that time.”

MAN is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.

The man who meditates is a depraved animal.

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.

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.

Every person has a right to risk their own life for the preservation of it.

There is peace in dungeons, but is that enough to make dungeons desirable?

I perceive God everywhere in His works. I sense Him in me; I see Him all around me.

Man’s first law is to watch over his own preservation; his first care he owes to himself; and as soon as he reaches the age of reason, he becomes the only judge of the best means to preserve himself; he becomes his own master.

Trust your heart rather than your head.

The people of England regards itself as free; but it is grossly mistaken; it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing.

Nothing on this earth is worth buying at the price of human blood.

I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.

The social pact, far from destroying natural equality, substitutes, on the contrary, a moral and lawful equality for whatever physical inequality that nature may have imposed on mankind; so that however unequal in strength and intelligence, men become equal by covenant and by right.

A taste for ostentation is rarely associated in the same souls with a taste for honesty.

Girls should learn that so much finery is only put on to hide defects, and that the triumph of beauty is to shine by itself.

To renounce freedom is to renounce one’s humanity, one’s rights as a man and equally one’s duties.