Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Patience patience quotes is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.Collection: Patience
The empire of woman is an empire of softness, of address, of complacency. Her commands are caresses, her menaces are tears.Collection: Women
Ruthless man: you begin by slaying the animal and then you devour it, as if to slay it twice. It is not enough. You turn against the dead flesh, it revolts you, it must be transformed by fire, boiled and roasted, seasoned and disguised with drugs; you must have butchers, cooks, turnspits, men who will rid the murder of its horrors, who will dress the dead bodies so that the taste decieved by these disguises will not reject what is strange to it, and will feast on corpses, the very sight of which would sicken you.Collection: Men
The thirst after happiness is never extinguished in the heart of man.Collection: Happiness
The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during election of members of parliament; as soon as the members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing. In the brief moment of its freedom, the English people makes such a use of that freedom that it deserves to lose it.Collection: Freedom
Love childhood, indulge its sports, its pleasures, its delightful instincts. Who has not sometimes regretted that age when laughter was ever on the lips, and when the heart was ever at peace?Collection: Sports
Education is either from nature, from man or from things. The developing of our faculties and organs is the education of nature; that of man is the application we learn to make of this very developing; and that of things is the experience we acquire in regard to the different objects by which we are affected. All that we have not at our birth, and that we stand in need of at the years of maturity, is the gift of education.Collection: Inspirational
There is no evildoer who could not be made good for something.Collection: Made
I had been brought up in a church which decides everything and permits no doubts, so that having rejected one article of faith I was forced to reject the rest.Collection: Doubt
We can never put ourselves in the shoes of children; we cannot fathom their thoughts, we lend them ours; and always following ourown reasoning, we stuff their heads with extravagance and error.Collection: Education
I think we cannot too strongly attack superstition, which is the disturber of society; nor too highly respect genuine religion, which is the support of it.Collection: Thinking
Had I no other proof of the immortality of the soul than the oppression of the just and the triumph of the wicked in this world, this alone would prevent my having the least doubt of it. So shocking a discord amidst a general harmony of things would make me naturally look for a cause; I should say to myself we do not cease to exist with this life; everything reassumes its order after death.Collection: Order
Liberty is obedience to the law which one has laid down for oneselfCollection: Law
Men will argue more philosophically about the human heart; but women will read the heart of man better than they.Collection: Heart
The animals you eat are not those who devour others; you do not eat the carnivorous beasts, you take them as your pattern. You only hunger for the sweet and gentle creatures which harm no one, which follow you, serve you, and are devoured by you as the reward of their service.Collection: Sweet
Trust your heart rather than your head.Collection: Heart
Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.Collection: Race
I have never believed that man's freedom consisted in doing what he wants, but rather in never doing what he does not want to do.Collection: Men
Living is not breathing but doing.Collection: Life
Socrates dies with honor, surrounded by his disciples listening to the most tender words -the easiest death that one could wish to die. Jesus dies in pain, dishonor, mockery, the object of universal cursing - the most horrible death that one could fear. At the receipt of the cup of poison, Socrates blesses him who could not give it to him without tears; Jesus, while suffering the sharpest pains, prays for His most bitter enemies. If Socrates lived and died like a philosopher, Jesus lived and died like a god.Collection: Jesus
Reason deceives us; conscience, never.Collection: Deceiving
No one is happy unless he respects himself.Collection: Respect
The money that we possess is the instrument of liberty, that which we lack and strive to obtain is the instrument of slavery.Collection: Money
Do not base your life on the judgments of others; first, because they are as likely to be mistaken as you are, and further, because you cannot know that they are telling you their true thoughts.Collection: Firsts
Truth is an homage that the good man pays to his own dignity.Collection: Men
Supreme happiness consists in self-content.Collection: Happiness
The greatest braggarts are usually the biggest cowards.Collection: Coward
We are reduced to asking others what we are. We never dare to ask ourselves.Collection: Identity
The mind grows narrow in proportion as the soul grows corrupt.Collection: Soul
The only moral lesson which is suited for a child--the most important lesson for every time of life--is this: 'Never hurt anybody.Collection: Hurt
Do you not know...that a child badly taught is farther from being wise than one not taught at all?Collection: Wise
The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, 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. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had some one pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: "Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!Collection: War
Luxury either comes of riches or makes them necessary; it corrupts at once rich and poor, the rich by possession and the poor by covetousness.Collection: Luxury
The most absolute authority is that which penetrates into a man's innermost being and concerns itself no less with his will than with his actions.Collection: Men
This dog, which, although no beauty, was of an uncommon breed, I had made my friend and companion; and it certainly deserved the name better than the majority of those who had assumed it.Collection: Dog
Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls.Collection: People
Every artists wants to be applaudedCollection: Artist
The want of occupation is no less the plague of society than of solitude.Collection: Solitude
It has always pleased me to read while eating if I have no companion; it gives me the society I lack. I devour alternately a page and a mouthful; it is as though my book were dining with me.Collection: Food
And when the relics of humanity left among the Spaniards induced them to forbid their lawyers to set foot in America, what must they have thought of jurisprudence? May it not be said that they thought, by this single expedient, to make reparation for all the outrages they had committed against the unhappy Indians?Collection: Feet
I believed that I was approaching the end of my days without having tasted to the full any of the pleasures for which my heart thirsted...without having ever tasted that passion which, through lack of an object, was always suppressed. ...The impossibility of attaining the real persons precipitated me into the land of chimeras; and seeing nothing that existed worthy of my exalted feelings, I fostered them in an ideal world which my creative imagination soon peopled with beings after my own heart.Collection: Real
There is one further distinguishing characteristic of man which is very specific indeed and about which there can be no dispute, and that is the faculty of self-improvement - a faculty which, with the help of circumstance, progressively develops all our other faculties.Collection: Men
Once you teach people to say what they do not understand, it is easy enough to get them to say anything you like. v One could wish no easier death than that of Socrates, calmly discussing philosophy with his friends; one could fear nothing worse than that of Jesus, dying in torment, among the insults, the mockery, the curses of the whole nation. In the midst of these terrible sufferings, Jesus prays for his cruel murderers. Yes, if the life and death of Socrates are those of a philosopher, the life and death of Christ are those of a God.Collection: Jesus
The taste for splendor is hardly ever combined in the same souls with the taste for the honorable.Collection: Soul
We do not know what really good or bad fortune is.Collection: Fortune
The truth brings no man a fortune.Collection: Men
Jewish authors would never have invented either that style nor that morality; and the Gospel has marks of truth so great, so striking, so utterly inimitable, that the invention of it would be more astonishing than the hero.Collection: Hero
Universal silence is taken to imply the consent of the people.Collection: Taken
Our passions are the chief means of self-preservation; to try to destroy them is therefore as absurd as it is useless; this would be to overcome nature, to reshape God's handiwork. If God bade man annihilate the passions he has given him, God would bid him be and not be; He would contradict himself. He has never given such a foolish commandment, there is nothing like it written on the heart of man, and what God will have a man do, He does not leave to the words of another man. He speaks Himself; His words are written in the secret heart.Collection: Mean