Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes
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Posterity is always just.
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Consolation indiscreetly pressed upon us, when we are suffering undue affliction, only serves to increase our pain, and to render our grief more poignant.
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As long as there are rich people in the world, they will be desirous of distinguishing themselves from the poor.
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Presence of mind, penetration, fine observation, are the sciences of women; ability to avail themselves of these is their talent.
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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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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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The happiest is he who suffers least; the most miserable is he who enjoys least.
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A man who is not a fool can rid himself of every folly except vanity.
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Luxury either comes of riches or makes them necessary; it corrupts at once rich and poor, the rich by possession and the poor by covetousness.
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To discover the rules of society that are best suited to nations, there would need to exist a superior intelligence, who could understand the passions of men without feeling any of them, who had no affinity with our nature but knew it to the full, whose happiness was independent of ours, but who would nevertheless make our happiness his concern, who would be content to wait in the fullness of time for a distant glory, and to labour in one age to enjoy the fruits in another. Gods would be needed to give men laws.
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Remorse sleeps during prosperity but awakes bitter consciousness during adversity.
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Women, in general, are not attracted to art at all, nor knowledge, and not at all to genius.
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Christ preaches only servitude and dependence... True Christians are made to be slaves.
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Not all the subtilties of metaphysics can make me doubt a moment of the immortality of the soul, and of a beneficent Providence. I feel it, I believe it, I desire it, I hope it, and will defend it to my last breath.
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One must choose between making a man or a citizen, for one cannot make both at the same time.
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I hate books; they only teach people to talk about what they don't understand.
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General abstract truth is the most precious of all blessings; without it, man is blind; it is the eye of reason.
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Laws are always useful to those who possess and vexatious to those who have nothing.
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I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.
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The one thing we do not know is the limit of the knowable.
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Gracefulness cannot subsist without ease; delicacy is not debility; nor must a woman be sick in order to please. Infirmity, and sickness may excite our pity, but desire and pleasure require the bloom and vigor of health.
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There is one further distinguishing characteristic of man which is very specific indeed and about which there can be no dispute, and that is the faculty of self-improvement - a faculty which, with the help of circumstance, progressively develops all our other faculties.
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Jewish authors would never have invented either that style nor that morality; and the Gospel has marks of truth so great, so striking, so utterly inimitable, that the invention of it would be more astonishing than the hero.
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Men will argue more philosophically about the human heart; but women will read the heart of man better than they.