Patience patience quotes is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.
Jean-Jacques RousseauRead
To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. For he who renounces everything no indemnity is possible. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man's nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Renouncing liberty is denying one's humanity and morality.
In this quote, Rousseau emphasizes the intrinsic link between liberty and humanity, suggesting that to give up one's freedom is to forsake one's very essence as a human being. He argues that true morality stems from the exercise of free will, and that without liberty, individuals lose their moral compass, making a complete renunciation of freedom incompatible with human nature and existence.
Themes
LibertyHumanityMoralityFreedomNature
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a discussion about civil rights and individual freedoms during a debate.
More from Jean-Jacques Rousseau
All quotes →The infant, on opening his eyes, ought to see his country, and to the hour of his death never lose sight of it.
Jean-Jacques RousseauRead
What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?
Jean-Jacques RousseauRead
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.
Jean-Jacques RousseauRead
Those people who treat politics and morality separately will never understand either of them.
Jean-Jacques RousseauRead
As evening approached, I came down from the heights of the island, and I liked then to go and sit on the shingle in some secluded spot by the lake; there the noise of the waves and the movement of the water, taking hold of my senses and driving all other agitation from my soul, would plunge me into delicious reverie in which night often stole upon me unawares.
Jean-Jacques RousseauRead
Similar quotes
Is not anyone with any degree of mental honesty conscious of telling lies all day long, both in talking and writing, simply because lies will fall into artistic shape when truth will not?
George OrwellRead
Think of giving not only as a duty but as a privilege.
John D. RockefellerRead
In living in the world by his own will and skill, the stupidest peasant or tribesman is more competent than the most intelligent worker or technician or intellectual in a society of specialists.
Wendell BerryRead
I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman's power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be. The author is unworthy of His own characters.
Joe HillRead
…* to learn that money makes life smooth in some ways, and to feel how tight and threadbare life is if you have too little. * to despise money, which is a farce, mere paper, and to hate what you have to do for it, and yet to long to have it in order to be free from slaving for it. * to yearn toward art, music, ballet and good books, and get them only in tantalizing snatches.
Sylvia PlathRead
Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world. They were like seeds in the beak of a bird, waiting to fall to earth, or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an instrument to bring their music into being.
John ConnollyRead