Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes

Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.

We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man's estate, is the gift of education.

It is not our criminal actions that require courage to confess, but those which are ridiculous and foolish.

Self-love is an instrument useful but dangerous; it often wounds the hand which makes use of it, and seldom does good without doing harm.

Your first duty is to be humane. Love childhood. Look with friendly eyes on its games, its pleasures, its amiable dispositions. Which of you does not sometimes look back regretfully on the age when laughter was ever on the lips and the heart free of care? Why steal from the little innocents the enjoyment of a time that passes all too quickly?

With children use force; with men reason; such is the natural order of things. The wise man requires no law.

Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.

To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.

To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn, and that which he will have the most need to know.

The strength of the people is effective only if it is concentrated; it evaporates and is lost when it is dispersed, just as gunpowder scattered on the ground ignites only grain by grain.

I have never believed that man's freedom consisted in doing what he wants, but rather in never doing what he does not want to do.

The writings of women are always cold and pretty like themselves. There is as much wit as you may desire, but never any soul.

No one is happy unless he respects himself.

Ought to have a universal compulsory force to move and arrange each part in the manner best suited to the whole. Just as nature gives each man an absolute power over all his members, the social compact gives the body politic an absolute power over all its members." "We grant that each person alienates, by the social compact, only that portion of his power, his goods, and liberty whose use is of consequence to the community; but we must also grant that only the sovereign is the judge of what is of consequence.

Accent is the soul of language; it gives to it both feeling and truth.

To discover the rules of society that are best suited to nations, there would need to exist a superior intelligence, who could understand the passions of men without feeling any of them, who had no affinity with our nature but knew it to the full, whose happiness was independent of ours, but who would nevertheless make our happiness his concern, who would be content to wait in the fullness of time for a distant glory, and to labour in one age to enjoy the fruits in another. Gods would be needed to give men laws.

Sovereigns always see with pleasure a taste for the arts of amusement and superfluity, which do not result in the exportation of bullion, increase among their subjects. They very well know that, besides nourishing that littleness of mind which is proper to slavery, the increase of artificial wants only binds so many more chains upon the people.

To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. For he who renounces everything no indemnity is possible. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man's nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts.

Watch a cat when it enters a room for the first time. It searches and smells about, it is not quiet for a moment, it trusts nothing until it has examined and made acquaintance with everything.

I believed that I was approaching the end of my days without having tasted to the full any of the pleasures for which my heart thirsted...without having ever tasted that passion which, through lack of an object, was always suppressed. ...The impossibility of attaining the real persons precipitated me into the land of chimeras; and seeing nothing that existed worthy of my exalted feelings, I fostered them in an ideal world which my creative imagination soon peopled with beings after my own heart.

A paralyzed man who wants to walk OR an agile man who does not want to walk will both remain neutral in nature.

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.

Do not base your life on the judgments of others; first, because they are as likely to be mistaken as you are, and further, because you cannot know that they are telling you their true thoughts.

...in respect of riches, no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself.

Remorse sleeps in the atmosphere of prosperity.

The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty.

He who has the base necessities of life should pay nothing; taxation on him who has a surplus may, if need be; extend to everything beyond necessities.

The bigger a state becomes the more liberty diminishes.

Women, in general, are not attracted to art at all, nor knowledge, and not at all to genius.

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.

Happiness: a good bank account, a good cook, and a good digestion.

One may live tranquilly in a dungeon; but does life consist in living quietly?

Remorse sleeps during prosperity but awakes bitter consciousness during adversity.

It is hard to prevent oneself from believing what one so keenly desires, and who can doubt that the interest we have in admitting or denying the reality of the Judgement to come determines the faith of most men in accordance with their hopes and fears.

An honest man nearly always thinks justly.

A born king is a very rare being.

Liberty may be gained, but can never be recovered.

One must choose between making a man or a citizen, for one cannot make both at the same time.

There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character.

Every man having been born free and master of himself, no one else may under any pretext whatever subject him without his consent. To assert that the son of a slave is born a slave is to assert that he is not born a man.

I love idleness. I love to busy myself about trifles, to begin a hundred things and not finish one of them, to come and go as my fancy bids me, to change my plan every moment, to follow a fly in all its circlings, to try and uproot a rock to see what is underneath, eagerly to begin a ten-years' task to give it up after ten minutes: in short, to fritter away the whole day inconsequentially and incoherently, and to follow nothing but the whim of the moment.

Socrates dies with honor, surrounded by his disciples listening to the most tender words -the easiest death that one could wish to die. Jesus dies in pain, dishonor, mockery, the object of universal cursing - the most horrible death that one could fear. At the receipt of the cup of poison, Socrates blesses him who could not give it to him without tears; Jesus, while suffering the sharpest pains, prays for His most bitter enemies. If Socrates lived and died like a philosopher, Jesus lived and died like a god.

The visible order of the universe proclaims a supreme intelligence.

Temperance and labor are the two best physicians of man; labor sharpens the appetite, and temperance prevents from indulging to excess

That man is truly free who desires what he is able to perform, and does what he desires.

War is then not a relationship between one man and another, but a relationship between one State and another, in which individuals are enemies only by accident, not as men, nor even as citizens, but as soldiers; not as members of the fatherland, but as its defenders. Finally, any State can only have other States, and not men, as enemies, inasmuch as it is impossible to fix a true relation between things of different natures.

I have always said and felt that true enjoyment can not be described.