Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes

Even knaves may be made good for something.

I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.

What, then, is the government? An intermediary body established between the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual communication, and charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance of freedom, civil as well as political.

Our greatest evil flows from ourselves.

We do not know either unalloyed happiness or unmitigated misfortune. Everything in this world is a tangled yarn; we taste nothing in its purity; we do not remain two moments in the same state. Our affections as well as bodies, are in a perpetual flux.

The only moral lesson which is suited for a child--the most important lesson for every time of life--is this: 'Never hurt anybody.

Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to save time, but to squander it.

In Genoa, the word, libertas can be read on the front of prisons and on the fetters of galley-slaves. The application of this motto is fine and just.

You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one.

Men speak from knowledge, women from imagination.

To study men, we must look close by; to study man, we must learn to look afar; if we are to discover essential characteristics, we must first observe differences.

When a man dies he clutches in his hands only that which he has given away during his lifetime.

Money is the seed of money.

Every free action has two causes that come together to produce it. One is moral, the will that determines the act; the other is physical, the power that executes the will to act.

If there were a nation of Gods, it would govern itself democratically. A government so perfect is not suited to men.

At first we will only skim the surface of the earth like young starlings, but soon, emboldened by practice and experience, we will spring into the air with the impetuousness of the eagle, diverting ourselves by watching the childish behavior of the little men or awling miserably around on the earth below us.

Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.

I hate books; they only teach people to talk about what they don't understand.

Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil.

Conscience is the voice of the soul, the passions are the voice of the body. It is strange that these voices often contradict each other?

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Her dignity consists in being unknown to the world; her glory is in the esteem of her husband; her pleasures in the happiness of her family.

At Genoa, the word Liberty may be read over the front of the prisons and on the chains of the galley-slaves. This application of the device is good and just. It is indeed only malefactors of all estates who prevent the citizen from being free. In the country in which all such men were in the galleys, the most perfect liberty would be enjoyed.

I was not much afraid of punishment, I was only afraid of disgrace.But that I feared more than death, more than crime, more than anything in the world. I should have rejoiced if the earth had swallowed me up and stifled me in the abyss. But my invincible sense of shame prevailed over everything . It was my shame that made me impudent, and the more wickedly I behaved the bolder my fear of confession made me. I saw nothing but the horror of being found out, of being publicly proclaimed, to my face, as a thief, as a liar, and slanderer.

Truth is an homage that the good man pays to his own dignity.

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.

Why should we build our happiness on the opinons of others, when we can find it in our own hearts?

The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.

I think we cannot too strongly attack superstition, which is the disturber of society; nor too highly respect genuine religion, which is the support of it.

Ah, that is a perfume in which I delight; when they roast coffee near my house, I hasten to open the door to take in all the aroma.

The falsification of history has done more to impede human development than any one thing known to mankind.

Good laws lead to the making of better ones; bad ones bring about worse.

Men, in general, are not this or that, they are what they are made to be.

How many famous and high-spirited heroes have lived a day too long?

There is no folly of which a man who is not a fool cannot get rid except vanity; of this nothing cures a man except experience of its bad consequences, if indeed anything can cure it.

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

A feeble body weakens the mind.

We cannot work for others without working for ourselves.

All kinds of frankness and honesty are terrible crimes in the eyes of society.

Frequent punishments are always a sign of weakness or laziness on the part of a government.

A citizen should render to the state all the services he can as soon as the sovereign demands them.

Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.

To make a man richer, give him more money of curb his desires.

Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it.

Physical evils destroy themselves, or they destroy us.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

Teach by doing whenever you can, and only fall back upon words when doing it is out of the question.

Money is the seed of money, and the first guinea is sometimes more difficult to acquire than the second million.