Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Confessions

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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."

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The money that we possess is the instrument of liberty, that which we lack and strive to obtain is the instrument of slavery.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind works only with my legs.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
General abstract truth is the most precious of all blessings; without it, man is blind; it is the eye of reason.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I loved too sincerely, too completely, I venture to say, to be able to be happy easily.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
It is as if my heart and my brain did not belong to the same person. Feelings come quicker than lightning and fill my soul, but they bring me no illumination; they burn me and dazzle me.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I know my heart, and have studied mankind; I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I at least claim originality, and whether Nature did wisely in breaking the mould with which she formed me, can only be determined after having read this work.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
He thinks like a philosopher, but governs like a king.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The thirst after happiness is never extinguished in the heart of man.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I remembered the way out suggested by a great princess when told that the peasants had no bread: "Well, let them eat cake".

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
It is not what is criminal that it is the hardest to reveal, but what is laughable or shameful.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Hatred, as well as love, renders its votaries credulous.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Remorse sleeps during a prosperous period but wakes up in adversity.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I have entered on an enterprise which is without precedent, and will have no imitator. I propose to show my fellows a man as nature made him, and this man shall be myself.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
It is not the criminal things which are hardest to confess, but the ridiculous and shameful.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Let the trumpet of the day of judgment sound when it will, I shall appear with this book in my hand before the Sovereign Judge, and cry with a loud voice, This is my work, there were my thoughts, and thus was I. I have freely told both the good and the bad, have hid nothing wicked, added nothing good.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Love, known to the person by whom it is inspired, becomes more bearable.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau