Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.

What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?

O love, if I regret the age when one savors you, it is not for the hour of pleasure, but for the one that follows it.

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about what we don't know.

Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.

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 from a fire is guilty of suicide?

I long remained a child, and I am still one in many respects.

No true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another.

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.

I may be no better, but at least I am different.

Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.

I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.

Religious persecutors are not believers, they are rascals.

Whoever blushes is already guilty; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.

God made me and broke the mold.

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.

We are born, so to speak, twice over; born into existence, and born into life; born a human being, and born a man.

I have resolved on an enterprise that has no precedent and will have no imitator. I want to set before my fellow human beings a man in every way true to nature; and that man will be myself.

I may not be better than other people, but at least I'm different.

Happiness: a good bank account, a good cook, and a good digestion.

He who is most slow in making a promise is the most faithful in performance of it.

Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.

Insults are the arguments employed by those who are in the wrong.

I only see clearly what I remember.

No man has any natural authority over his fellow men.

Let us be more simple and less vain.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

Abstaining so as really to enjoy, is the epicurism, the very perfection, of reason.

We are born so to speak twice over born into existence and born into life born a human being and born a man.

He who blushes is already guilty.

To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn and that which he will have the most need to know.

A citizen should render to the state all the services he can as soon as the sovereign demands them.

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

It is not possible for minds degraded by a host of trivial concerns to ever rise to anything great.

Conscience is the voice of the soul the passions of the body.

The less reasonable a cult is the more men seek to establish it by force.

It is in mans heart that the life of natures spectacle exists to see it one must feel it.

To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness.

Days of absence, sad and dreary, Clothed in sorrow's dark array, “ Days of absence, I am weary; She I love is far away.

Liberty is obedience to the law which one has laid down for oneself.

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

When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.

The truths of the Scriptures are so marked and inimitable, that the inventor would be more of a miraculous character than the hero.

The truths of the Scriptures are so marked and inimitable, that the inventor would be more of a miraculous character than the hero.

Smell is the sense of memory and desire.

Being wealthy isn't just a question of having lots of money. It's a question of what we want. Wealth isn't an absolute, it's relative to desire. Every time we seek something that we can't afford, we can be counted as poor, how much money we may actually have.

I can remember the frustration of not being able to talk. I knew what I wanted to say, but I could not get the words out, so I would just scream.

What I try to do for my readers is to pass on some of the things that I found out about being thirteen after doing it for forty years.