Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Insults are the arguments employed by those who are in the wrong.
The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.
No man has any natural authority over his fellow men.
What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?
You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one.
It is unnatural for a majority to rule, for a majority can seldom be organized and united for specific action, and a minority can.
Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.
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?
Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.
Happiness: a good bank account, a good cook, and a good digestion.
The English think they are free. They are free only during the election of members of parliament.
People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.
Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is.
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.
Childhood is the sleep of reason.
We should not teach children the sciences; but give them a taste for them.
Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.
I may be no better, but at least I am different.
Gratitude is a duty which ought to be paid, but which none have a right to expect.
Force does not constitute right... obedience is due only to legitimate powers.
Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.
Whoever blushes is already guilty; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.
Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone.
It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.
Every man has a right to risk his own life for the preservation of it.
A feeble body weakens the mind.
The person who has lived the most is not the one with the most years but the one with the richest experiences.
When something an affliction happens to you, you either let it defeat you, or you defeat it.
I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.
Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it.
Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.
God made me and broke the mold.
Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.
We are born, so to speak, twice over; born into existence, and born into life; born a human being, and born a man.
I have always said and felt that true enjoyment can not be described.
Heroes are not known by the loftiness of their carriage; the greatest braggarts are generally the merest cowards.
Money is the seed of money, and the first guinea is sometimes more difficult to acquire than the second million.
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.
Take the course opposite to custom and you will almost always do well.
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.
The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it.
Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.
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.
Remorse sleeps during prosperity but awakes bitter consciousness during adversity.
The English are predisposed to pride, the French to vanity.
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.
How many famous and high-spirited heroes have lived a day too long?
We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.
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.
