Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAUThe sociable man, always outside himself, is capable of living only in the opinions of others and, so to speak, derives the sentiment of his own existence solely from their judgment.
More Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes
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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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I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.
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If there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof is most complete. And with all that, who is there who believes in vampires?
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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 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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Nature made me happy and good, and if I am otherwise, it is society’s fault.
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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 -
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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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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He who blushes is already guilty.
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If 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.
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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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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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The sociable man, always outside himself, is capable of living only in the opinions of others and, so to speak, derives the sentiment of his own existence solely from their judgment.
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My birth was my first misfortune.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU






