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.

The social pact, far from destroying natural equality, substitutes, on the contrary, a moral and lawful equality for whatever physical inequality that nature may have imposed on mankind; so that however unequal in strength and intelligence, men become equal by covenant and by right.

Childhood is the sleep of reason.

Teach by doing whenever you can, and only fall back upon words when doing it is out of the question.

Since men cannot create new forces, but merely combine and control those which already exist, the only way in which they can preserve themselves is by uniting their separate powers in a combination strong enough to overcome any resistance, uniting them so that their powers are directed by a single motive and act in concert.

I had been brought up in a church which decides everything and permits no doubts, so that having rejected one article of faith I was forced to reject the rest.

Temperance and labor are the two best physicians of man; labor sharpens the appetite, and temperance prevents from indulging to excess