"Remorse sleeps during prosperity but awakes bitter consciousness during adversity."

"The first sentiment of man was that of his existence, his first care that of preserving it."

"I perceive God everywhere in His works. I sense Him in me, I see Him all around me."

"When something an affliction happens to you, you either let it defeat you, or you defeat it."

"Every man has a right to risk his own life for the preservation of it."

"So finally we tumble into the abyss, we ask God why he has made us so feeble. But, in spite of ourselves, He replies through our consciences: 'I have made you too feeble to climb out of the pit, because i made you strong enough not to fall in."

"People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little."

"I may not amount to much but at least I am unique."

"Most nations, as well as people are impossible only in their youth; they become incorrigible as they grow older."

"The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it."

"Or, rather, let us be more simple and less vain."

"The word 'slavery' and 'right' are contradictory, they cancel each other out. Whether as between one man and another, or between one man and a whole people, it would always be absurd to say: "I hereby make a covenant with you which is wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; I will respect it so long as I please and you shall respect it as long as I wish."

"Happy am I, for every time I meditate on governments, I always find new reasons in my inquiries for loving my own country."

"Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone."

"We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced."

"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in shackles."

"You will never be free as long as there remains one Russian soldier in Poland and your freedom will always be threatened as long as Russia interferes in your affairs."

"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."

"I have never thought, for my part, that man's freedom consists in his being able to do whatever he wills, but that he should not, by any human power, be forced to do what is against his will."

"All of my misfortunes come from having thought too well of my fellows."

"I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery."

"The truth brings no man a fortune."

"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."

"Take the course opposite to custom and you will almost always do well."

"To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties."

"We seek knowledge only because we desire enjoyment, and it is impossible to conceive why a person who has neither desires nor fears would take the trouble to reason."

"Every person has a right to risk their own life for the preservation of it."

"Fame is but the breath of people, and that often unwholesome."

"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."

"It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living."

"Liberty is like those solid and tasty foods or those full-bodied wines which are appropriate for nourishing and strengthening robust constitutions that are used to them, but which overpower, ruin and intoxicate the weak and delicate who are not suited for them."

"Even the soberest judged it requisite to sacrifice one part of their liberty to ensure the other, as a man, dangerously wounded in any of his limbs, readily parts with it to save the rest of his body."

"A feeble body weakens the mind."

"The English think they are free. They are free only during the election of members of parliament."

"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?"

"We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man's estate, is the gift of education."

"The bounds of human possibility are not as confining as we think they are; they are made to seem to be tight by our weaknesses, our vices, our prejudices that confine them."

"The body should be strong enough to obey the mind; a good servant must be strong. I know that intemperance stimulates the passions; in course of time it also destroys the body; fasting and penance often produce the same results in an opposite way. The weaker the body, the more imperious its demands; the stronger it is, the better it obeys. All sensual passions find their home in effeminate bodies; the less satisfaction they can get the keener their sting."

"Heroes are not known by the loftiness of their carriage; the greatest braggarts are generally the merest cowards."

"When I stay in one Place, I can hardly think at all; my body had to be on the move to set my mind going." Jean-Jacques Rousseau."

"I had brought from Paris the national prejudice against Italian music, but I had also received from nature that acute sensibility against which prejudices are powerless. I soon contracted the passion it inspires in all those born to understand it."

"The English are predisposed to pride, the French to vanity."

"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."

"I can only meditate when I am walking, when I stop I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs."

"I hate books they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about."

"The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, 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."

"As soon as any man says of the affairs of the State "What does it matter to me?" the State may be given up for lost."

"Now it is easy to perceive that the moral part of love is a factitious sentiment, engendered by society, and cried up by the women with great care and address in order to establish their empire, and secure command to that sex which ought to obey."

"Government in its infancy had no regular and permanent form. For want of a sufficient fund of philosophy and experience, men could see no further than the present inconveniences, and never thought of providing remedies for future ones, but in proportion as they arose."

"The decent man and the lover holds back even when he could obtain what he wishes. To win this silent consent is to make use of all the violence permitted in love. To read it in the eyes, to see it in the ways in spite of the mouth's denial, that is the art of he who knows how to love. If he then completes his happiness, he is not brutal, he is decent. He does not insult chasteness; he respects it; he serves it."