"What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?"
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau quotes (page 2 of 20)
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"Conscience is the voice of the soul, the passions are the voice of the body. Is it astonishing that often these two languages contradict each other, and then to which must we listen? Too often reason deceives us; we have only too much acquired the right of refusing to listen to it; but conscience never deceives us; it is the true guide of man; it is to man what instinct is to the body; which follows it, obeys nature, and never is afraid of going astray."
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"Our greatest misfortunes come to us from ourselves."
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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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"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."
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"Insults are the arguments employed by those who are in the wrong."
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"No man has any natural authority over his fellow men."
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"To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness."
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"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."
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"Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it."
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"Every man has a right to risk his own life for the preservation of it."
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"It is unnatural for a majority to rule, for a majority can seldom be organized and united for specific action, and a minority can."
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"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."
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"The passions are the voice of the body."
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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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"It is believed that physiognomy is only a simple development of the features already marked out by nature. It is my opinion, however, that in addition to this development, the features come insensibly to be formed and assume their shape from the frequent and habitual expression of certain affections of the soul. These affections are marked on the countenance; nothing is more certain than this; and when they turn into habits, they must leave on it durable impressions."
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"Social man lives constantly outside himself."
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"The world is the book of women. Whatever knowledge they may possess is more commonly acquired by observation than by reading."
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"To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. For he who renounces everything no indemnity is possible. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man's nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts."
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"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."
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