"Whoever blushes confesses guilt, true innocence never feels shame."
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Quote collection
Jean-Jacques Rousseau quotes (page 15 of 20)
388 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Physical evils destroy themselves, or they destroy us."
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"Equality is deemed by many a mere speculative chimera, which can never be reduced to practice. But if the abuse is inevitable, does it follow that we ought not to try at least to mitigate it? It is precisely because the force of things tends always to destroy equality that the force of the legislature must always tend to maintain it."
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"The opportunity of making happy is more scarce than we imagine; the punishment of missing it is, never to meet with it again; and the use we make of it leaves us an eternal sentiment of satisfaction or repentance."
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"To study men, we must look close by; to study man, we must learn to look afar; if we are to discover essential characteristics, we must first observe differences."
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"There is no folly of which a man who is not a fool cannot get rid except vanity; of this nothing cures a man except experience of its bad consequences, if indeed anything can cure it."
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"War then, is a relation - not between man and man but between state and state and individuals are enemies only accidentally not as men, nor even as citizens but as soldiers not as members of their country, but as its defenders"
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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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"Supreme happiness consists in self-content; that we may gain this self-content, we are placed upon this earth and endowed with freedom."
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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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"The strength of the people is effective only if it is concentrated; it evaporates and is lost when it is dispersed, just as gunpowder scattered on the ground ignites only grain by grain."
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"A child who passes through many hands in turn, can never be well brought up. At every change he makes a secret comparison, which continually tends to lessen his respect for those who control him, and with it their authority over him. If once he thinks there are grown-up people with no more sense than children the authority of age is destroyed and his education is ruined."
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"But in some great souls, who consider themselves as citizens of the world, and forcing the imaginary barriers that separate people from people."
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"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."
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"I bold it impossible, that the great monarchies of Europe can subsist much longer; they all affect magnificence and splendor."
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"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."
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"Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls."
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"Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."
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"I was not much afraid of punishment, I was only afraid of disgrace.But that I feared more than death, more than crime, more than anything in the world. I should have rejoiced if the earth had swallowed me up and stifled me in the abyss. But my invincible sense of shame prevailed over everything . It was my shame that made me impudent, and the more wickedly I behaved the bolder my fear of confession made me. I saw nothing but the horror of being found out, of being publicly proclaimed, to my face, as a thief, as a liar, and slanderer."
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"Liberty is not to be found in any form of government; she is in the heart of the free man; he bears her with him everywhere."
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