7 Quotes Tagged: emile

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.