Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes
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It is not our criminal actions that require courage to confess, but those which are ridiculous and foolish.
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We cannot teach children the danger of telling lies to men without realising, on the man's part, the danger of telling lies to children. A single untruth on the part of the master will destroy the results of his education.
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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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For, as I think I have said, I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.
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What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?
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The French painter Rousseau was once asked why he put a naked woman on a red sofa in the middle of his jungle pictures. He answered, 'I needed a bit of red there.'
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Too much apparatus, designed to guide us in experiments and to supplement the exactness of our senses, makes us neglect to use those senses...The more ingenious our apparatus, the coarser and more unskillful are our senses. We surround ourselves with tools and fail to use those which nature has provided every one of us.
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Our greatest evil flows from ourselves.
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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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Money is the seed of money, and the first guinea is sometimes more difficult to acquire than the second million.
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I don't know what is truth,but I can tell you how to find it!
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Trust your heart rather than your head.
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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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The tone of good conversation is brilliant and natural; it is neither tedious nor frivolous; it is instructive without pedantry, gay without tumultuousness, polished without affectation, gallant without insipidity, waggish without equivocation.
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Base souls have no faith in great individuals.
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Since men cannot create new forces, but merely combine and control those which already exist, the only way in which they can preserve themselves is by uniting their separate powers in a combination strong enough to overcome any resistance, uniting them so that their powers are directed by a single motive and act in concert.
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Do you not know...that a child badly taught is farther from being wise than one not taught at all?
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At Genoa, the word Liberty may be read over the front of the prisons and on the chains of the galley-slaves. This application of the device is good and just. It is indeed only malefactors of all estates who prevent the citizen from being free. In the country in which all such men were in the galleys, the most perfect liberty would be enjoyed.
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Why should we build our happiness on the opinons of others, when we can find it in our own hearts?
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Leave those vain moralists, my friend, and return to the depth of your soul: that is where you will always rediscover the source of the sacred fire which so often inflamed us with love of the sublime virtues; that is where you will see the eternal image of true beauty, the contemplation of which inspires us with a holy enthusiasm.
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The English people think they are free; they are greatly deceived; they are free only during the election of members of Parliament.
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Do to others as you would have others do to you, inspires all men with that other maxim of natural goodness a great deal less perfect, but perhaps more useful: Do good to yourself with as little prejudice as you can to others.
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Even knaves may be made good for something.
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Teach by doing whenever you can, and only fall back upon words when doing it is out of the question.