"The person who has lived the most is not the one with the most years but the one with the richest experiences."

"You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one."

"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 world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless."

"Liberty is like rich food and strong wine: the strong natures accustomed to them thrive and grow even stronger on them; but they deplete, inebriate and destroy the weak."

"I may not be better than other people, but at least I'm different."

"Whoever blushes is already guilty; true innocence is ashamed of nothing."

"Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces."

"How much more reasonable is it to say with the sage Plato, that the perfect happiness of a state consists in the subjects obeying their prince, the prince obeying the laws, and the laws being equitable and always directed to the good of the public?"

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

"There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character."

"Teach your scholar to observe the phenomena of nature; you will soon rouse his curiosity, but if you would have it grow, do not be in too great a hurry to satisfy this curiosity. Put the problems before him and let him solve them himself. Let him know nothing because you have told him, but because he has learnt it for himself. Let him not be taught science, let him discover it. If ever you substitute authority for reason he will cease to reason; he will be a mere plaything of other people's thoughts."

"I ask: which of the two, civil or natural life, is more likely to become insufferable to those who live it? We see about us practically no people who do not complain about their existence; many even deprive themselves of it to the extent they are able, and the combination of divine and human laws is hardly enough to stop this disorder."

"Why do you consult [women's] words when it is not their mouths that speak? Consult their eyes, their colour, their breathing, their timid manner, their slight resistance, that is the language nature gave them for your answer. The lips always say 'No,' and rightly so; but the tone is not always the same, and that cannot lie. Has not a woman the same needs as a man, but without the same right to make them known? Her fate would be too cruel if she had no language in which to express her legitimate desires except the words which she dare not utter."

"In any case, frequent punishments are a sign of weakness or slackness in the government. There is no man so bad that he cannot be made good for something. No man should be put to death, even as an example, if he can be left to live without danger to society."

"I may be no better, but at least I am different."

"Among the many short cuts to science, we badly need someone to teach us the art of learning with difficulty."

"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."

"More than half of my life is past, I have left only the time I need for turning the rest of it to account and for effacing my errors by my virtues."

"If there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof is most complete. And with all that, who is there who believes in vampires?"

"He who is most slow in making a promise is the most faithful in performance of it."

"Religious persecutors are not believers, they are rascals."

"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."

"I hate books; they only teach us to talk about what we don't know."

"We do not know what is really good or bad fortune."

"Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves."

"I know that [civilized men] do nothing but boast incessantly of the peace and repose they enjoy in their chains.... But when I see [barbarous man] sacrifice pleasures, repose, wealth, power, and life itself for the preservation of this sole good which is so disdained by those who have lost it; when I see animals born free and despising captivity break their heads against the bars of their prison; when I see multitudes of entirely naked savages scorn European voluptuousness and endure hunger, fire, the sword, and death to preserve only their independence, I feel it does not behoove slaves to reason about freedom."

"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."

"To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn, and that which he will have the most need to know."

"To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life."

"Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost."

"Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being."

"Europe had fallen back into the barbarity of the first ages. People from this part of world, so enlightened today, lived a few centuries ago in a state worse than ignorance. Some sort of learned jargon much more despicable than ignorance had usurped the name of knowledge and set up an almost invincible obstacle in the way of its return. A revolution was necessary to bring men back to common sense, and it finally came from a quarter where one would least expect it. It was the stupid Muslim, the eternal blight on learning, who brought about its rebirth among us."

"Happiness: a good bank account, a good cook, and a good digestion."

"I hate books they teach us only to talk about what we do not know."

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

"Truth is an homage that the good man pays to his own dignity."

"Children are taught to look down on their nurses (nannies), to treat them as mere servants. When their task is completed the child is withdrawn or the nurse is dismissed. Her visits to her foster-child are discouraged by a cold reception. After a few years the child never sees her again. The mother expects to take her place, and to repair by her cruelty the results of her own neglect. But she is greatly mistaken; she is making an ungrateful foster-child, not an affectionate son; she is teaching him ingratitude, and she is preparing him to despise at a later day the mother who bore him, as he now despises his nurse."

"Entirely taken up by the present, I could remember nothing; I had no distinct notion of myself as a person, nor had I the least idea of what had just happened to me. I did not know who I was, nor where I was; I felt neither pain, fear, nor anxiety. I watched my blood flowing as I might have watched a stream, without even thinking that the blood had anything to do with me. I felt throughout my whole being such a wonderful calm, that whenever I recall this feeling I can find nothing to compare with it in all the pleasures that stir our lives."

"What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?"

"Money is the seed of money, and the first guinea is sometimes more difficult to acquire than the second million."

"Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil."

"The body politic, as well as the human body, begins to die as soon as it is born, and carries itself the causes of its destruction."

"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."

"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."

"Whether the woman shares the man's passion or not, whether she is willing or unwilling to satisfy it, she always repulses him and defends herself, though not always with the same vigour, and therefore not always with the same success."

"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."

"The happiest is he who suffers the least pain the most miserable he who enjoys the least pleasure."

"We must powder our wigs, that is why so many poor people have no bread."

"She was dull, unattractive, couldn't tell the time, count money or tie her own shoe laces... But I loved her."