Patience patience quotes is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.
Jean-Jacques RousseauRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Live fully and consciously rather than merely existing.
In this quote, Rousseau emphasizes that the essence of life is not merely measured by the length of days lived, but rather by the depth and quality of one's experiences and actions. He argues that a life devoid of meaningful engagement with the world is a life unlived, suggesting that true fulfillment comes from actively participating in the richness of existence rather than simply avoiding death.
Themes
LifeActionExistenceConsciousnessExperience
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational speech about living life to the fullest.
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.
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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.
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Those people who treat politics and morality separately will never understand either of them.
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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
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