#emile

More than half of my life is past; I have left only the time I need for turning the rest of it to account and for effacing my errors by my virtues. ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#error #life #past #virtue #life

For Zola, as for Huysmans, nature itself is uncanny because it is the domain of the feminine, a domain that is constitutionally defective, lacking, even pathological. ↗

— Charles Bernheimer

#decadent #emile-zola #feminine #joris-kerl-huysmans #nature

I say to myself: "Who are you to measure infinite power? ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#faith #god #humanity #faith

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

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#emile #life #simplicity #vanity #life

I perceive God everywhere in His works. I sense Him in me; I see Him all around me. ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#faith #god #nature #faith

We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man's estate, is the gift of education. ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#emile #education

Teach him to live rather than to avoid death: life is not breath, but action, the use of our senses, our mind, our faculties, every part of ourselves which makes us conscious of our being. Life consists less in length of days than in the keen sense of living. A man maybe buried at a hundred and may never have lived at all. He would have fared better had he died young. ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#emile #death

Our wisdom is slavish prejudice, our customs consist in control, constraint, compulsion. Civilised man is born and dies a slave. The infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the corpse is nailed down in his coffin. All his life long man is imprisoned by our institutions. ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#emile #education