“People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.”
― Jean Jacques Rousseau
“I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“I am not made like any of those I have seen. I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different.”
― Jean Jacques Rousseau
“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!”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“What wisdom can you find greater than kindness.”
― Jean Jacques Rousseau
“Why should we build our happiness on the opinons of others, when we can find it in our own hearts?”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Every person has a right to risk their own life for the preservation of it.”
― Jean Jacques Rousseau
“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.”
― Jean Jacques Rosseau
“Or, rather, let us be more simple and less vain.”
― Rousseau Jean-Jacques
“Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it. ”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“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.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“All my misfortunes come of having thought too well of my fellows.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“They say that Caliph Omar, when consulted about what had to be done with the library of Alexandria, answered as follows: ‘If the books of this library contain matters opposed to the Koran, they are bad and must be burned. If they contain only the doctrine of the Koran, burn them anyway, for they are superfluous.’ Our learned men have cited this reasoning as the height of absurdity. However, suppose Gregory the Great was there instead of Omar and the Gospel instead of the Koran. The library would still have been burned, and that might well have been the finest moment in the life of this illustrious pontiff.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“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.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“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”
― Jean-Jaques Rousseau
“I perceive God everywhere in His works. I sense Him in me; I see Him all around me.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said “This is mine,” and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: 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.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“…in respect of riches, no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“In truth, laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to those who have nothing; from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all possess something and none has too much.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Trust your heart rather than your head.”
― Jean Jacques Rousseau
“To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“The truth brings no man a fortune.”
― Jean Jacques Rousseau
“Teach your scholar to observe the phenomena of nature; you will soon rouse his curiosity, but if you would have it grow, do not be in too great a hurry to satisfy this curiosity. Put the problems before him and let him solve them himself. Let him know nothing because you have told him, but because he has learnt it for himself. Let him not be taught science, let him discover it. If ever you substitute authority for reason he will cease to reason; he will be a mere plaything of other people’s thoughts.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“As soon as any man says of the affairs of the State “What does it matter to me?” the State may be given up for lost.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“In any case, frequent punishments are a sign of weakness or slackness in the government. There is no man so bad that he cannot be made good for something. No man should be put to death, even as an example, if he can be left to live without danger to society.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“There is nothing better than the encouragement of a good friend.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“If there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“It is as if my heart and my brain did not belong to the same person. Feelings come quicker than lightning and fill my soul, but they bring me no illumination; they burn me and dazzle me.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“The extreme inequality of our ways of life, the excess of idleness among some and the excess of toil among others, the ease of stimulating and gratifying our appetites and our senses, the over-elaborate foods of the rich, which inflame and overwhelm them with indigestion, the bad food of the poor, which they often go withotu altogether, so hat they over-eat greedily when they have the opportunity; those late nights, excesses of all kinds, immoderate transports of every passion, fatigue, exhaustion of mind, the innumerable sorrows and anxieties that people in all classes suffer, and by which the human soul is constantly tormented: these are the fatal proofs that most of our ills are of our own making, and that we might have avoided nearly all of them if only we had adhered to the simple, unchanging and solitary way of life that nature ordained for us. ”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“We must powder our wigs; that is why so many poor people have no bread.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Love, known to the person by whom it is inspired, becomes more bearable.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“My illusions about the world caused me to think that in order to benefit by my reading I ought to possess all the knowledge the book presupposed. I was very far indeed from imagining that often the author did not possess it himself, but had extracted it from other books, as and when he needed it. This foolish conviction forced me to stop every moment, and to rush incessantly from one book to another; sometimes before coming to the tenth page of the one I was trying to read I should, by this extravagant method, have had to run through whole libraries. Nevertheless I stuck to it so persistently that I wasted infinite time, and my head became so confused that I could hardly see or take in anything.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“It is easier to conquer than to administer. With enough leverage, a finger could overturn the world; but to support the world, one must have the shoulders of Hercules.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Once you teach people to say what they do not understand, it is easy enough to get them to say anything you like.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“The only moral lesson which is suited for a child–the most important lesson for every time of life–is this: ‘Never hurt anybody.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“The word ‘slavery’ and ‘right’ are contradictory, they cancel each other out. Whether as between one man and another, or between one man and a whole people, it would always be absurd to say: “I hereby make a covenant with you which is wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; I will respect it so long as I please and you shall respect it as long as I wish.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“In all the ills that befall us, we are more concerned by the intention than the result. A tile that falls off a roof may injure us more seriously, but it will not wound us so deeply as a stone thrown deliberately by a malevolent hand. The blow may miss, but the intention always strikes home.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“In a well governed state, there are few punishments, not because there are many pardons, but because criminals are rare; it is when a state is in decay that the multitude of crimes is a guarantee of impunity.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“A born king is a very rare being.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“She was dull, unattractive, couldn’t tell the time, count money or tie her own shoe laces… But I loved her”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau