Jean-Jacques Rousseau
He who is slowest in making a promise is most faithful in its performance.
The happiest is the person who suffers the least pain; the most miserable who enjoys the least pleasure.
Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.
The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it
Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.
Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.
Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.
Your first appearance, he said to me, is the gauge by which you will be measured; try to manage that you may go beyond yourself in after times, but beware of ever doing less.
God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.
One loses all the time which he might employ to better purpose.
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.
Happiness: a good bank account, a good cook and a good digestion.
The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty.
Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.
Society's institutions, like government, schools, the arts, and the media, corrupt naturally good individuals.
One would see the multitude oppressed inside society as a consequence of the very precautions taken against threats from outside, one would see oppression increase continually without the oppressed ever being able to know where it would end, nor what legitimate means remained for them to halt it.
Never exceed your rights, and they will soon become unlimited.
The person who has lived the most is not the one with the most years but the one with the richest experiences.
As for you, your happiness is complete; it remains merely to enjoy it. And to become perfectly happy you are in need of nothing more than to know how to be satisfied with being so.
To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. For he who renounces everything no indemnity is possible. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man's nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts.
