God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.
My passions, when roused, are intense, and, so long as I am activated by them, nothing equals my impetuosity. I no longer know moderation, respect, fear, propriety; I am cynical, brazen, violent, fearless; no sense of shame deters me, no danger alarms me. Except for the object of my passion, the whole world is as nothing to me; but this only lasts for a moment, and the next I am plunged into utter dejection.
The wisest writers devote themselves to what a man ought to know, without asking what a child is capable of learning.
To live is not to breathe but to act.
To be driven by our appetites alone is slavery, while to obey a law that we have imposed on ourselves is freedom.
Gambling is only the resource of those who do not know what to do with themselves.
A taste for ostentation is rarely associated in the same souls with a taste for honesty.
My birth was my first misfortune.
Social man lives always outside himself; he knows how to live only in the opinion of others, it is, so to speak, from their judgement alone that he derives the sense of his own existence.
I am a hundred times happier in my solitude than I could be if I lived among them.
To live is not merely to breathe; it is to act; it is to make use of our organs, senses, faculties – of all those parts of ourselves which give us the feeling of existence.
The spectacle of nature, by growing quite familiar to him, becomes at last equally indifferent. It is constantly the same order, constantly the same revolutions; he has not sense enough to feel surprise at the sight of the greatest wonders; and it is not in his mind we must look for that philosophy, which man must have to know how to observe once, what he has every day seen.” Jean Jacques Rousseau, On the Inequality among Mankind, Ch. 1, 20.
When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.
It is pity in which the state of nature takes the place of laws, morals and virtues, with the added advantage that no one there is tempted to disobey its gentle voice.
What good is it looking for our happiness in the opinion of others if we can find it in ourselves?
Whoever is endowed with a power superior to mankind, should also be above the weakness of humanity, without which, that excess of strength would, in effect, only sink him below the most feeble, or what he would actually have been, had he remained their equal.
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.
It is a great evil for a Chief of a nation to be born the enemy of the freedom whose defender he should be.
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.
From this moment there would be no question of virtue or morality; for despotism cui ex honesto nulla est spes, wherever it prevails, admits no other master; it no sooner speaks than probity and duty lose their weight and blind obedience is the only virtue which slaves can still practice.