Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes
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It is well known that a loose and easy dress contributes much to give to both sexes those fine proportions of body that are observable in the Grecian statues, and which serve as models to our present artists.
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I have resolved on an enterprise that has no precedent and will have no imitator. I want to set before my fellow human beings a man in every way true to nature; and that man will be myself.
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Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone.
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The general will is always right.
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We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.
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I have never believed that man's freedom consisted in doing what he wants, but rather in never doing what he does not want to do.
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At first we will only skim the surface of the earth like young starlings, but soon, emboldened by practice and experience, we will spring into the air with the impetuousness of the eagle, diverting ourselves by watching the childish behavior of the little men or awling miserably around on the earth below us.
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Finance is a slave's word.
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One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.
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The passions are the voice of the body.
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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.
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Childhood is the sleep of reason. [Fr., L'enfance est le sommeil de la raison.]
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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.
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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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Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil.
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I may not amount to much, but at least I am unique.
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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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Men speak from knowledge, women from imagination.
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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?
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Your first duty is to be humane. Love childhood. Look with friendly eyes on its games, its pleasures, its amiable dispositions. Which of you does not sometimes look back regretfully on the age when laughter was ever on the lips and the heart free of care? Why steal from the little innocents the enjoyment of a time that passes all too quickly?
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The truths of the Scriptures are so marked and inimitable, that the inventor would be more of a miraculous character than the hero.
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Every free action has two causes that come together to produce it. One is moral, the will that determines the act; the other is physical, the power that executes the will to act.
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Or, rather, let us be more simple and less vain.
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The mechanism she employs is much more powerful than ours, for all her levers move the human heart.