Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes
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The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.
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The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it.
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Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.
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It is hard to prevent oneself from believing what one so keenly desires.
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A born king is a very rare being.
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I feel an indescribable ecstasy and delirium in melting, as it were, into the system of being, in identifying myself with the whole of nature.
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Insults are the arguments employed by those who are in the wrong.
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Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it.
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Accent is the soul of language; it gives to it both feeling and truth.
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Do not base your life on the judgments of others; first, because they are as likely to be mistaken as you are, and further, because you cannot know that they are telling you their true thoughts.
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Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.
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I believed that I was approaching the end of my days without having tasted to the full any of the pleasures for which my heart thirsted...without having ever tasted that passion which, through lack of an object, was always suppressed. ...The impossibility of attaining the real persons precipitated me into the land of chimeras; and seeing nothing that existed worthy of my exalted feelings, I fostered them in an ideal world which my creative imagination soon peopled with beings after my own heart.
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Do not judge, and you will never be mistaken.
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Peter had a genius for imitation; but he lacked true genius, which is creative and makes all from nothing.
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In a well governed state, there are few punishments, not because there are many pardons, but because criminals are rare; it is when a state is in decay that the multitude of crimes is a gaurantee of impunity.
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There as here, passions are the motive of all action, but they are livelier, more ardent, or merely simpler and purer, thereby assuming a totally different character. All the first movements of nature are good and right.
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No true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another.
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The most absolute authority is that which penetrates into a man's innermost being and concerns itself no less with his will than with his actions.
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The visible order of the universe proclaims a supreme intelligence.
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Chemistry... is like the maid occupied with daily civilisation; she is busy with fertilisers, medicines, glass, insecticides ... for she dispenses the recipes.
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In any case, frequent punishments are a sign of weakness or slackness in the government. There is no man so bad that he cannot be made good for something. No man should be put to death, even as an example, if he can be left to live without danger to society.
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I have entered on an enterprise which is without precedent, and will have no imitator. I propose to show my fellows a man as nature made him, and this man shall be myself.
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Universal silence is taken to imply the consent of the people.
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The want of occupation is no less the plague of society than of solitude.