"The end of this speech cruelly belied the brilliant hopes given to me by the beginning. "What, always a lackey?" I said to myself with a bitter disd… - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The savage lives within himself; social man lives always outside himself; he knows how to live only in the opinion of others, it is, so to speak, from their judgement alone that he derives the sense of his own existence. It is not my subject here to show how such a disposition gives birth to so much indifference to good and evil coupled with such beautiful talk about morality; or how, as everything is reduced to appearances, everything comes to be false and warped: honour, friendship, virtue, and often even vices themselves, since in the end men discover the secret of boasting about vices; or show how, as a result of always asking others what we are and never daring to put the question to ourselves in the midst of so much philosophy, humanity, civility and so many sublime maxims, we have only façades, deceptive and frivolous, honour without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness.

Ne détruisons point les instruments du bonheur parce que les méchants s'en servent quelquefois à nuire.

Let us listen to the inner voice of feeling; what healthy mind can reject its evidence? I believe, therefore, that the world is governed by a wise and powerful will; I see it or rather I feel it, and it is a great thing to know this. I see God everywhere in his works; I feel him within myself. Again, I know that I am a free, active being. In vain do you argue this point with me; I feel it, and it is this feeling which speaks to me more forcibly than the reason which disputes it.