Quit thy childhood, my friend, and wake up!
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAUQuit thy childhood, my friend, and wake up!
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAUNature made me happy and good, and if I am otherwise, it is society’s fault.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAUIf we assume man has been corrupted by an artificial civilization, what is the natural state? the state of nature from which he has been removed? imagine, wandering up and down the forest without industry, without speech, and without home.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAUA taste for ostentation is rarely associated in the same souls with a taste for honesty.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAUIn any real democracy, magistracy isn’t a benefit—it’s a burdensome responsibility that can’t fairly be imposed on one individual rather than another.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAUMy 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.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAUBeing wealthy isn’t just a question of having lots of money. It’s a question of what we want. Wealth isn’t an absolute, it’s relative to desire. Every time we seek something that we can’t afford, we can be counted as poor, how much money we may actually have.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAUI prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAUThere is no evildoer who could not be made good for something.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAUTruth is an homage that the good man pays to his own dignity.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAUCivilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAUIt is a great evil for a Chief of a nation to be born the enemy of the freedom whose defender he should be.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAUI feel an indescribable ecstasy and delirium in melting, as it were, into the system of being, in identifying myself with the whole of nature..
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAUIt is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAUThe first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAUThe real world has its limits; the imaginary world is infinite. Unable to enlarge the one, let us restrict the other, for it is from the difference between the two alone that are born all the pains which make us truly unhappy.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU