Alas, it is when we are beginning to leave this mortal body that it most offends us!
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAUMAN is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.
More Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes
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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 never thought, for my part, that man’s freedom consists in his being able to do whatever he wills, but that he should not, by any human power, be forced to do what is against his will.
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There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character.
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I feel an indescribable ecstasy and delirium in melting, as it were, into the system of being, in identifying myself with the whole of nature.
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I perceive God everywhere in His works. I sense Him in me; I see Him all around me.
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The 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.
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However great a man’s natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.
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If there were a nation of Gods, it would govern itself democratically. A government so perfect is not suited to men.
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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.
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To do is to be.
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Trust your heart rather than your head.
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Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Maker of the world, but degenerates once it gets into the hands of man
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He who pretends to look on death without fear lies. All men are afraid of dying, this is the great law of sentient beings, without which the entire human species would soon be destroyed.
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To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.
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Oh, man! Live your own life and no longer be wretched!
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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.
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He who blushes is already guilty.
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The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘this is mine’, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.
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My birth was my first misfortune.
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To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties.
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There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character.
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I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.
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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.
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Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.
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It is pity in which the state of nature takes the place of laws, morals and virtues, with the added advantage that no one there is tempted to disobey its gentle voice.
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The 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