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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Cities are the abyss of the human species.
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To live is not breathing it is action.
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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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To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness.
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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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Childhood is the sleep of reason.
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If there wasn't a God we would have to invent one to keep people sane.
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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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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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Never exceed your rights, and they will soon become unlimited.
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Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.
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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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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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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.
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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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Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.
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The apparent ease with which children learn is their ruin.
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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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I think we cannot too strongly attack superstition, which is the disturber of society; nor too highly respect genuine religion, which is the support of it.
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Supreme happiness consists in self-content; that we may gain this self-content, we are placed upon this earth and endowed with freedom.
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Had I no other proof of the immortality of the soul than the oppression of the just and the triumph of the wicked in this world, this alone would prevent my having the least doubt of it. So shocking a discord amidst a general harmony of things would make me naturally look for a cause; I should say to myself we do not cease to exist with this life; everything reassumes its order after death.
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Whence do I get my rules of conduct? I find them in my heart. Whatever I feel to be good is good. Whatever I feel to be evil is evil. Conscience is the best of casuists.
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The social pact, far from destroying natural equality, substitutes, on the contrary, a moral and lawful equality for whatever physical inequality that nature may have imposed on mankind; so that however unequal in strength and intelligence, men become equal by covenant and by right.