Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes
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People in their natural state are basically good. But this natural innocence,however, is corrupted by the evils of society.
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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.
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Cities are the abyss of the human species.
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To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness.
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The person who has lived the most is not the one with the most years but the one with the richest experiences.
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To live is not breathing it is action.
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Childhood is the sleep of reason.
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The abuse of books kills science. Believing that we know what we have read, we believe that we can dispense with learning it.
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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.
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If there wasn't a God we would have to invent one to keep people sane.
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We can never put ourselves in the shoes of children; we cannot fathom their thoughts, we lend them ours; and always following ourown reasoning, we stuff their heads with extravagance and error.
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Never exceed your rights, and they will soon become unlimited.
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Equality is deemed by many a mere speculative chimera, which can never be reduced to practice. But if the abuse is inevitable, does it follow that we ought not to try at least to mitigate it? It is precisely because the force of things tends always to destroy equality that the force of the legislature must always tend to maintain it.
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Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.
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Liberty may be gained, but can never be recovered.
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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.
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Quit thy childhood, my friend, and wake up!
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It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.
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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.
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Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.
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Usurpers always bring about or select troublous times to get passed, under cover of the public terror, destructive laws, which the people would never adopt in cold blood. The moment chosen is one of the surest means of distinguishing the work of the legislator from that of the tyrant.
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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.
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I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.
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Two things, almost incompatible, are united in me in a manner which I am unable to understand: a very ardent temperament, lively and tumultuous passions, and, at the same time, slowly developed and confused ideas, which never present themselves until it is too late. One might say that my heart and my mind do not belong to the same person.