Book//mark – Julie, or the New Heloise | Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1761

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Julie or the New Heloise Jean Jacques Rousseau 1761

^ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Portrait by Maurice Quentin de La Tour, 1753
Julie, or the New Heloise, 1761 ^

“As long as we desire, we can do without happiness: we expect to achieve it. If happiness fails to come, hope persists, and the charm of illusion lasts as long as the passion that causes it. So this condition is sufficient in itself, and the anxiety it inflicts is a sort of enjoyment that compensates for reality… Woe to him who has nothing left to desire… We enjoy less what we obtain than what we hope for, and we are happy only before being happy.”

“I adored you and desired nothing.”

“O love! If I long for the days when one savors thee, it is not for the hour of ecstasy; it is for the hour that follows it.”

“True courage has more constancy and less eagerness; it is always that which it should be; it is necessary neither to stir it on nor to hold it back: the good man carries it with him everywhere— into combat against the enemy, into a gathering where he stands for those absent or for the truth, into his bed against the attacks of sorrow and death. The strength of soul which inspires it is in evidence in all ages; it always places virtue above events, and does not consist in fighting, but in fearing nothing.”

“Virtue is a state of war, and that living in it means onealways has some battle to wage against oneself.”

“Love will pass, and virtues will remain.”

“The source of happiness is not totally in the desired object nor in the heart which possesses it, but in the relationship of one and the other, and . . . as all the objects of our desires are not capable of producing felicity, all the states of the heart are not capable of feeling it. If the purest soul is not alone sufficient to its own happiness, it is surer still that all the delights of the earth would not be able to make [happy] a depraved heart; because there is on both sides a necessary preparation, a certain coming-together from which comes this precious sentiment sought after by all sensitive beings, and always ignored by the false sage who limits himself to the pleasure of the moment in the place of knowing a durable happiness.”

” If love is a desire which is enflamed by obstacles, as you were still saying, it is not good that it be content; it is better that it last and be unhappy than that it extinguish itself in the bosom of pleasure. Your (love) fire, I swear, has stood the test of possession, of time, of absence and of sufferings of all kind; it has conquered all obstacles except for the most powerful of all, which is to no longer have anything to vanquish, and to nourish itself solely from itself. The universe has never seen a passion stand up to that test; what right did you have to hope that yours would?”

“The first step toward vice is to go about innocent actions in a mysterious manner, and whoever likes secrecy sooner or later has reason to be secretive.”

“Only the order and the rule that multiplies and perpetuates the use of goods can transform pleasure into happiness.”

“One does not see others act, except insofar as one acts oneself; in the school of the world as in that of love, one must begin by practicing what one wants to learn.”

“He who has felt nothing can learn nothing.”

“The youth of the wise man is the time of his experiences, his passions being the instruments of them; but after having applied his soul to exterior objects in order to feel them, he turns his soul within himself in order to consider them, to compare them, to know them.”

“My imagination no longer has anything to do, I have nothing to desire; to feel and to enjoy are the same thing for me; I live simultaneously in all that I love, I am full of happiness and life: 0 death, come when you wish! I no longer fear you, I have lived, I wait for you, I have no more new feelings to know, you have nothing more to take from me.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or the New Heloise, 1761

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Book//mark – The Princesse de Clèves | Madame de La Fayette (1678)

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