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"We do not know what is really good or bad fortune."
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"And I have to consider myself fortunate, because there are plenty of writers who spend most of a lifetime looking for that certain something without ever finding it."

"Calamities are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others."

"The fortune which nobody sees makes a person happy and unenvied."

"Ill fortune never crushed that man whom good fortune deceived not."

"I have always believed that all things depended upon Fortune, and nothing upon ourselves."

"One is never more on trial than in the moment of excessive good fortune."
Explore more quotes by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"They say that Caliph Omar, when consulted about what had to be done with the library of Alexandria, answered as follows: 'If the books of this library contain matters opposed to the Koran, they are bad and must be burned. If they contain only the doctrine of the Koran, burn them anyway, for they are superfluous.' Our learned men have cited this reasoning as the height of absurdity. However, suppose Gregory the Great was there instead of Omar and the Gospel instead of the Koran. The library would still have been burned, and that might well have been the finest moment in the life of this illustrious pontiff."

"The sword wears out its sheath, as it is sometimes said. That is my story. My passions have made me live, and my passions have killed me. What passions, it may be asked. Trifles, the most childish things in the world. Yet they affected me as much as if the possessions of Helen, or the throne of the Universe, had been at stake."

"A feeble body makes a feeble mind. I do not know what doctors cure us of, but I know this: they infect us with very deadly diseases, cowardice, timidity, credulity, the fear of death. What matter if they make the dead walk, we have no need of corpses; they fail to give us men, and it is men we need."

"All wickedness comes from weakness. The child is wicked only because he is weak. Make him strong, he will be good. He who could do everything would never do harm."

"We cannot teach children the danger of lying to men without feeling as men, the greater danger of lying to children."
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