The extreme inequality of our ways of life, the excess of idleness among some and the excess of toil among others, the ease of stimulating and gratifying our appetites and our senses, the over-elabora...
Nature made me happy and good, and if I am otherwise, it is society's fault.
If force compels obedience, there is no need to invoke a duty to obey, and if force ceases to compel obedience, there is no longer any obligation.
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 a fire is guilty of suicide?
Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to save time, but to squander it.
A child who passes through many hands in turn, can never be well brought up. At every change he makes a secret comparison, which continually tends to lessen his respect for those who control him, and...
I hate books they teach us only to talk about what we do not know.
Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.
When I stay in one Place, I can hardly think at all; my body had to be on the move to set my mind going." Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
My illusions about the world caused me to think that in order to benefit by my reading I ought to possess all the knowledge the book presupposed. I was very far indeed from imagining that often the au...
There is no real advance in human reason, for what we gain in one direction we lose in another; for all minds start from the same point, and as the time spent in learning what others have thought is s...
I may not amount to much but at least I am unique.
God made me and broke the mold.
Truth is an homage that the good man pays to his own dignity.
Once you teach people to say what they do not understand, it is easy enough to get them to say anything you like.
It is a great and beautiful spectacle to see a man somehow emerging from oblivion by his own efforts, dispelling with the light of his reason the shadows in which nature had enveloped him, rising abov...
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...
حتى لو كان في وسع الفلاسفة أن يكتشفوا الحقيقة من منهم يهتم بها؟ كل واحد منهم يعلم أن مقولته ليست أوثق تأصيلاً من غيرها، لكنه يتشبث بها لأنها من إبداعه. لا واحد منهم حتى لو تبين الحق وميزه عن الباطل، ي...
انزع من قلب الإنسان حب الجمال تسلب الحياة روعتها وجاذبيتها.
When one has suffered or fears suffering, one pities those who suffer; but when one is suffering, one pities only oneself.