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There is one further distinguishing characteristic of man which is very specific indeed and about which there can be no dispute, and that is the faculty of self-improvement - a faculty which, with the help of circumstance, progressively develops all our other faculties.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Age: 66 †
Born: 1712
Born: June 28
Died: 1778
Died: July 2
Autobiographer
Botanist
Choreographer
Composer
Correspondent
Encyclopédistes
Essayist
Literary
Music Critic
Music Theorist
Musicologist
Genève
J. J. Rousseau
Rousseau
Jean Jaques Rousseau
Jean Jeacques Rousseau
John James Rousseau
Johann Jacob Rousseau
Juan Jacobo Rousseau
Jan Jakub Rouseau
Gian Giacomo Rousseau
Lu-so
G. G. Rousseau
Zhan Zhak Russo
Citizen of Geneva
Citoyen de Genève
Jean Jacques
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Improvement
Develops
Indeed
Faculties
Circumstances
Disputes
Help
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Helping
Circumstance
Self
Faculty
Progressively
Men
Characteristics
Distinguishing

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A person who can break wind is not dead.
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I don't know what is truth,but I can tell you how to find it!
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Watch a cat when it enters a room for the first time. It searches and smells about, it is not quiet for a moment, it trusts nothing until it has examined and made acquaintance with everything.
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The political body, therefore, is also a moral being which has a will and this general will, which tends always to the conservation and well-being of the whole and of each part of it ... is, for all members of the state ... the rule of what is just or unjust.
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Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.
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The French, for example, are a contemptible nation.
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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.
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Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.
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An intelligent being, is the active principle of all things. One must have renounced all common sense to doubt it, and it is a waste of time to try to prove such self evident truth.
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Women, in general, are not attracted to art at all, nor knowledge, and not at all to genius.
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I have never thought, for my part, that man's freedom consists in his being able to do whatever he wills, but that he should not, by any human power, be forced to do what is against his will.
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The strength of the people is effective only if it is concentrated it evaporates and is lost when it is dispersed, just as gunpowder scattered on the ground ignites only grain by grain.
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We do not know what really good or bad fortune is.
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To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties.
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I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.
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Presence of mind, penetration, fine observation, are the sciences of women ability to avail themselves of these is their talent.
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No one is happy unless he respects himself.
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There is no folly of which a man who is not a fool cannot get rid except vanity of this nothing cures a man except experience of its bad consequences, if indeed anything can cure it.
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Accent is the soul of language it gives to it both feeling and truth.
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We are born, so to speak, twice over born into existence, and born into life born a human being, and born a man.
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