My bad head cannot adjust itself to the way things are.... If I want to depict spring, it has to be in wintertime; if I want to describe a beautiful landscape, I must be enclosed within walls; and I have said a hundred times that if I were put in the Bastille, there I would paint a picture of liberty.

To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life.

People in their natural state are basically good. But this natural innocence,however, is corrupted by the evils of society.

Or, rather, let us be more simple and less vain.

Do you not know...that a child badly taught is farther from being wise than one not taught at all?

Money is the seed of money, and the first guinea is sometimes more difficult to acquire than the second million.

The social compact sets up among the citizens as equality of such kind, that they all bind themselves to observe the same conditions and should therefore all enjoy the same rights.