Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes

Time destroys the speculation of men, but it confirms nature.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

It's all very brilliant to build bridges and buildings, but long after we're gone, it will be the natural things in this world which will still be here.

HAMLET [...] we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table; that's the end. CLAUDIUS Alas, alas. HAMLET A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm. CLAUDIUS What dost thou mean by this? HAMLET Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.

How old the world is! I walk between two eternities.... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, that valley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don't want to die!

Somehow, in the process of trying to deny that things are always changing, we lose our sense of the sacredness of life. We tend to forget that we are part of the natural scheme of things.

It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man's deeper nature is soon found out.

To-day kings, to-marrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves that they are nothing.

What you call your personality, you know? --it's not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been.

He removed several pages of death certificates, which were picked up by another breeze and sent into the trees. Some would fall with the leaves that September. Some would fall with the trees generations later.

Coming, going, the waterbirds, don't leave a trace, don't follow a path.

History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the inscription molders from the tablet: the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust?

Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour and is not reminded of the flux of all things?

A generation of men is like a generation of leaves; the wind scatters some leaves upon the ground, while others the burgeoning wood brings forth - and the season of spring comes on. So of men one generation springs forth and another ceases.

Up with the sun. Gone with the wind.

Rain slips through your fingers as easily as words blow away in the wind, and yet it has the power to destroy your whole world.

Let there be a heaven so that man may outlive his grasses.

Wolves are disciplined not only when they hunt but also when they travel, when they play, and when they eat. Nature doesn't view discipline as a negative thing. Discipline is DNA. Discipline is survival.

Ilk cowslip cup shall kep a tear.

Leaves die, but trees do not. They only undress.

Time has a doomsday book, upon whose pages he is continually recording illustrious names. But as often as a new name is written there, an old one disappears. Only a few stand in illuminated characters never to be effaced.

Nothing in the cry of cicadas suggests they are about to die

How many million Aprils came before I ever knew how white a cherry bough could be, a bed of squills, how blue And many a dancing April when life is done with me, will lift the blue flame of the flower and the white flame of the tree Oh burn me with your beauty then, oh hurt me tree and flower, lest in the end death try to take even this glistening hour.