Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes

Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone.

Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.

Gracefulness cannot subsist without ease; delicacy is not debility; nor must a woman be sick in order to please. Infirmity, and sickness may excite our pity, but desire and pleasure require the bloom and vigor of health.

From the first moment of life, men ought to begin learning to deserve to live; and, as at the instant of birth we partake of the rights of citizenship, that instant ought to be the beginning of the exercise of our duty.

The science of government is only a science of combinations, of applications, and of exceptions, according to times, places and circumstances.

There is not a single ill-doer who could not be turned to some good.

People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.

The English are predisposed to pride, the French to vanity.

But remain the teacher of the young teachers. Advise and direct us, and we will be ready to learn. I will have need of you as long as I live.

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.

Childhood has it's own way of seeing, thinking, and feeling, and nothing is more foolish than to try to substitute ours for theirs.

The happiest is he who suffers least; the most miserable is he who enjoys least.

Innocence is ashamed of nothing.

Love childhood, indulge its sports, its pleasures, its delightful instincts. Who has not sometimes regretted that age when laughter was ever on the lips, and when the heart was ever at peace?

Fame is but the breath of people, and that often unwholesome.

As long as there are rich people in the world, they will be desirous of distinguishing themselves from the poor.

Smell is the sense of memory and desire.

Government originated in the attempt to find a form of association that defends and protects the person and property of each with the common force of all.

Reason deceives us; conscience, never.

Supreme happiness consists in self-content.

War then, is a relation - not between man and man but between state and state and individuals are enemies only accidentally not as men, nor even as citizens but as soldiers not as members of their country, but as its defenders

I perceive God everywhere in His works. I sense Him in me; I see Him all around me.

Sacrifice life to truth.

The more humanity owes him, the more society denies him. Every door is shut against him, even when he has a right to its being opened: and if he ever obtains justice, it is with much greater difficulty than others obtain favors.

I bold it impossible, that the great monarchies of Europe can subsist much longer; they all affect magnificence and splendor.

Consolation indiscreetly pressed upon us, when we are suffering undue affliction, only serves to increase our pain, and to render our grief more poignant.

The mind grows narrow in proportion as the soul grows corrupt.

If Socrates died like a philosopher, Jesus Christ died like a God.

Let the trumpet of the day of judgment sound when it will, I shall appear with this book in my hand before the Sovereign Judge, and cry with a loud voice, This is my work, there were my thoughts, and thus was I. I have freely told both the good and the bad, have hid nothing wicked, added nothing good.

Universal silence is taken to imply the consent of the people.