Patience patience quotes is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.
Jean-Jacques RousseauRead
In truth, laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to those who have nothing; from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all possess something and none has too much.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that laws benefit the wealthy while disadvantaging the poor, proposing that a balanced society is one where everyone has something and no one has too much.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau highlights the inequity inherent in laws, pointing out that they often serve the interests of those who are already privileged. He argues that a just social structure is one in which wealth and resources are distributed in a manner that ensures fairness, suggesting that a society is most beneficial when resources are shared equitably, preventing extreme disparities in wealth and power.
Themes
LawsSocial JusticeWealthEqualitySociety
In practice
Example use cases
During a discussion on social justice reforms.
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
I do not bring forgiveness with me, nor forgetfulness. The only ones who can forgive are dead; the living have no right to forget.
Chaim HerzogRead
So, if you don’t fit in, if you feel at odds with the world, if your identity is troubled and frayed, if you feel lost and ashamed - it could be because you have retained the human values you were supposed to have discarded. You are a deviant. Be proud.
George MonbiotRead
All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.
Rebecca WestRead
It is an item of faith that we are children of God; there is plenty of experience in us against it. The faith that surmounts this evidence and is able to warm itself at the fire of God's love, instead of having to steal love and self-acceptance from other sources, is actually the root of holiness: It is a fatal mistake to think of holiness as a possession which we have distinct from our faith... Faith is the very highest form of our dependence on God.
Richard LovelaceRead
Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment but nothing is quite as splendidly uplifting to the heart as the defeat of a human being who battles against the invincible superiority of fate. This is always the most grandiose of all tragedies, one sometimes created by a dramatist but created thousands of times by life.
Stefan ZweigRead
Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.
Oscar WildeRead