You are worried about seeing him spend his early years in doing nothing. What! Is it nothing to be happy? Nothing to skip, play and run around all day long? Never in his life will he be so busy again.
When a man dies he clutches in his hands only that which he has given away during his lifetime.
There is no evildoer who could not be made good for something.
Freedom is the power to choose our own chains.
At length I recollected the thoughtless saying of a great princess, who, on being informed that the country people had no bread, replied, “Let them eat cake”.
The most absolute authority is that which penetrates into a man’s innermost being and concerns itself no less with his will than with his actions.
If I am part of a group of 100 people, do 99 people have the right to sentence me to death, just because they are majority?
He who pretends to look on death without fear lies. All men are afraid of dying, this is the great law of sentient beings, without which the entire human species would soon be destroyed.
Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.
Love childhood, indulge its sports, its pleasures, its delightful instincts. Who has not sometimes regretted that age when laughter was ever on the lips, and when the heart was ever at peace?
Equality, because without it there can be no liberty.
The French painter Rousseau was once asked why he put a naked woman on a red sofa in the middle of his jungle pictures. He answered, ‘I needed a bit of red there.’
Men, in general, are not this or that, they are what they are made to be.
Whence do I get my rules of conduct? I find them in my heart. Whatever I feel to be good is good. Whatever I feel to be evil is evil. Conscience is the best of casuists.
One may live tranquilly in a dungeon; but does life consist in living quietly?
To try to conceal our own heart is a bad means to read that of others.
The general will is always right.
We can never put ourselves in the shoes of children; we cannot fathom their thoughts, we lend them ours; and always following ourown reasoning, we stuff their heads with extravagance and error.
Abstract truth is the eye of reason.
Jewish authors would never have invented either that style nor that morality; and the Gospel has marks of truth so great, so striking, so utterly inimitable, that the invention of it would be more astonishing than the hero.