Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes
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It is hard to prevent oneself from believing what one so keenly desires.
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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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Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it.
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A country cannot subsist well without liberty, nor liberty without virtue.
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Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.
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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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And when the relics of humanity left among the Spaniards induced them to forbid their lawyers to set foot in America, what must they have thought of jurisprudence? May it not be said that they thought, by this single expedient, to make reparation for all the outrages they had committed against the unhappy Indians?
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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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Accent is the soul of language; it gives to it both feeling and truth.
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A paralyzed man who wants to walk OR an agile man who does not want to walk will both remain neutral in nature.
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Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.
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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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Do not judge, and you will never be mistaken.
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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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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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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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The thirst after happiness is never extinguished in the heart of man.
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She was dull, unattractive, couldn't tell the time, count money or tie her own shoe laces... But I loved her
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The want of occupation is no less the plague of society than of solitude.
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I do not know is a phrase which becomes us.
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Universal silence is taken to imply the consent of the people.
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The French, for example, are a contemptible nation.