Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes
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I may not be better than other people, but at least I'm different.
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The man who gets the most out of life is not the one who has lived it longest, but the one who has felt life most deeply.
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To make a man richer, give him more money of curb his desires.
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Whatever may be our natural talents, the art of writing is not acquired all at once.
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All kinds of frankness and honesty are terrible crimes in the eyes of society.
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Childhood has it's own way of seeing, thinking, and feeling, and nothing is more foolish than to try to substitute ours for theirs.
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The mechanism she employs is much more powerful than ours, for all her levers move the human heart.
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I will say little of the importance of a good education; nor will I stop to prove that the current one is bad. Countless others have done so before me, and I do not like to fill a book with things everybody knows. I will note that for the longest time there has been nothing but a cry against the established practice without anyone taking it upon himself to propose a better one. The literature and the learning of our age tend much more to destruction than to edification.
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Gratitude is a duty which ought to be paid, but which none have a right to expect.
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Our greatest evil flows from ourselves.
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A child who passes through many hands in turn, can never be well brought up. At every change he makes a secret comparison, which continually tends to lessen his respect for those who control him, and with it their authority over him. If once he thinks there are grown-up people with no more sense than children the authority of age is destroyed and his education is ruined.
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Finance is a slave's word.
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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.
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Men, in general, are not this or that, they are what they are made to be.
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As evening approached, I came down from the heights of the island, and I liked then to go and sit on the shingle in some secluded spot by the lake; there the noise of the waves and the movement of the water, taking hold of my senses and driving all other agitation from my soul, would plunge me into delicious reverie in which night often stole upon me unawares.
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This dog, which, although no beauty, was of an uncommon breed, I had made my friend and companion; and it certainly deserved the name better than the majority of those who had assumed it.
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The social compact sets up among the citizens as equality of such kind, that they all bind themselves to observe the same conditions and should therefore all enjoy the same rights.
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The members of a body-politic call it "the state" when it is passive, "the sovereign" when it is active, and a "power" when they compare it with others of its kind. Collectively they use the title "people," and they refer to one another individually as "citizens" when speaking of their participation in the authority of the sovereign, and as "subjects" when speaking of their subordination to the laws of the state.
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I bold it impossible, that the great monarchies of Europe can subsist much longer; they all affect magnificence and splendor.
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Everything made by man may be destroyed by man; there are no ineffaceable characters except those engraved by nature; and nature makes neither princes nor rich men nor great lords.
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How many famous and high-spirited heroes have lived a day too long?
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My liveliest delight was in having conquered myself.
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Ruthless man: you begin by slaying the animal and then you devour it, as if to slay it twice. It is not enough. You turn against the dead flesh, it revolts you, it must be transformed by fire, boiled and roasted, seasoned and disguised with drugs; you must have butchers, cooks, turnspits, men who will rid the murder of its horrors, who will dress the dead bodies so that the taste decieved by these disguises will not reject what is strange to it, and will feast on corpses, the very sight of which would sicken you.
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Men speak from knowledge, women from imagination.