Whoever blushes is already guilty; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Insults are the arguments employed by those who are in the wrong.
God made me and broke the mold.
No man has any natural authority over his fellow men.
O love, if I regret the age when one savors you, it is not for the hour of pleasure, but for the one that follows it.
Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to save time, but to squander it.
Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.
I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.
Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.
Take the course opposite to custom and you will almost always do well.
Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.
The English are predisposed to pride, the French to vanity.
Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.
The English think they are free. They are free only during the election of members of parliament.
We do not know what is really good or bad fortune.
To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn, and that which he will have the most need to know.
I have always said and felt that true enjoyment can not be described.
What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?
Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?
I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.
Religious persecutors are not believers, they are rascals.
I long remained a child, and I am still one in many respects.
It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.
No true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another.
Take from the philosopher the pleasure of being heard and his desire for knowledge ceases.
Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.
Remorse sleeps during prosperity but awakes bitter consciousness during adversity.
Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.
Money is the seed of money, and the first guinea is sometimes more difficult to acquire than the second million.
Our affections as well as our bodies are in perpetual flux.
Fame is but the breath of people, and that often unwholesome.
The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it.
How many famous and high-spirited heroes have lived a day too long?
A feeble body weakens the mind.
Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.
Happiness: a good bank account, a good cook, and a good digestion.
I have resolved on an enterprise that has no precedent and will have no imitator. I want to set before my fellow human beings a man in every way true to nature; and that man will be myself.
We are born, so to speak, twice over; born into existence, and born into life; born a human being, and born a man.
I only see clearly what I remember.
I may be no better, but at least I am different.
However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.
We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.
The first step towards vice is to shroud innocent actions in mystery, and whoever likes to conceal something sooner or later has reason to conceal it.
Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it.
Most nations, as well as people are impossible only in their youth; they become incorrigible as they grow older.
All of my misfortunes come from having thought too well of my fellows.
Gratitude is a duty which ought to be paid, but which none have a right to expect.
Base souls have no faith in great individuals.
The person who has lived the most is not the one with the most years but the one with the richest experiences.
Heroes are not known by the loftiness of their carriage; the greatest braggarts are generally the merest cowards.
