Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes

I had been brought up in a church which decides everything and permits no doubts, so that having rejected one article of faith I was forced to reject the rest.

All that time is lost which might be better employed.

Plants are shaped by cultivation and men by education. .. We are born weak, we need strength; we are born totally unprovided, we need aid; we are born stupid, we need judgment. Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given us by education.

No man has any natural authority over his fellow men.

It is believed that physiognomy is only a simple development of the features already marked out by nature. It is my opinion, however, that in addition to this development, the features come insensibly to be formed and assume their shape from the frequent and habitual expression of certain affections of the soul. These affections are marked on the countenance; nothing is more certain than this; and when they turn into habits, they must leave on it durable impressions.

The passions are the voice of the body.

Quit thy childhood, my friend, and wake up!

To abstain that we may enjoy is the epicurianism of reason.

Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Maker of the world, but degenerates once it gets into the hands of man

Whoever blushes is already guilty; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.

We do not know what really good or bad fortune is.

Supreme happiness consists in self-content; that we may gain this self-content, we are placed upon this earth and endowed with freedom.

The thirst after happiness is never extinguished in the heart of man.

Since men cannot create new forces, but merely combine and control those which already exist, the only way in which they can preserve themselves is by uniting their separate powers in a combination strong enough to overcome any resistance, uniting them so that their powers are directed by a single motive and act in concert.

Do you not know...that a child badly taught is farther from being wise than one not taught at all?

I long remained a child, and I am still one in many respects.

I may not be better than other people, but at least I'm different.

Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping from them.

Behold the works of our philosophers; with all their pompous diction, how mean and contemptible they are by comparison with the Scriptures! Is it possible that a book at once so simple and sublime should be merely the work of man?

We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.

It has always pleased me to read while eating if I have no companion; it gives me the society I lack. I devour alternately a page and a mouthful; it is as though my book were dining with me.

I feel an indescribable ecstasy and delirium in melting, as it were, into the system of being, in identifying myself with the whole of nature.

Take the course opposite to custom and you will almost always do well.

It is manifestly contrary to the law of nature, however defined, that a handful of people should gorge themselves with superfluities while the hungry majority goes in need of necessities.

I have never thought, for my part, that man's freedom consists in his being able to do whatever he wills, but that he should not, by any human power, be forced to do what is against his will.

I don't know what is truth,but I can tell you how to find it!

The indifference of children towards meat is one proof that the taste for meat is unnatural; their preference is for vegetable foods...Beware of changing this natural taste and making children flesh-eaters, if not for their health's sake, for the sake of their character; for how can one explain away the fact that great meat-eaters are usually fiercer and more cruel than other men; this has been recognised at all times and in all places.

Those people who treat politics and morality separately will never understand either of them.

One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.

All through life a man has need of a counsellor and guide.

If there wasn't a God we would have to invent one to keep people sane.

It is unnatural for a majority to rule, for a majority can seldom be organized and united for specific action, and a minority can.

The French painter Rousseau was once asked why he put a naked woman on a red sofa in the middle of his jungle pictures. He answered, 'I needed a bit of red there.'

Patience patience quotes is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.

Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.

Christ preaches only servitude and dependence... True Christians are made to be slaves.

Temperance and labor are the two real physicians of man.

A man speaks of what he knows, a woman of what pleases her: the one requires knowledge, the other taste.

Do not judge, and you will never be mistaken.

The opportunity of making happy is more scarce than we imagine; the punishment of missing it is, never to meet with it again; and the use we make of it leaves us an eternal sentiment of satisfaction or repentance.

Childhood is the sleep of reason.

Luxury either comes of riches or makes them necessary; it corrupts at once rich and poor, the rich by possession and the poor by covetousness.

The person who has lived the most is not the one with the most years but the one with the richest experiences.

Posterity is always just.

The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had some one pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: "Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!

I do not know is a phrase which becomes us.

Religious persecutors are not believers, they are rascals.

You are worried about seeing him spend his early years in doing nothing. What! Is it nothing to be happy? Nothing to skip, play and run around all day long? Never in his life will he be so busy again.