Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes
-
Let's go dance under the elms:Step lively, young lassies.Let's go dance under the elms:Gallants, take up your pipes.
-
Great men never make bad use of their superiority. They see it and feel it and are not less modest. The more they have, the more they know their own deficiencies.
-
The more humanity owes him, the more society denies him. Every door is shut against him, even when he has a right to its being opened: and if he ever obtains justice, it is with much greater difficulty than others obtain favors.
-
I say to myself: "Who are you to measure infinite power?
-
Education is either from nature, from man or from things. The developing of our faculties and organs is the education of nature; that of man is the application we learn to make of this very developing; and that of things is the experience we acquire in regard to the different objects by which we are affected. All that we have not at our birth, and that we stand in need of at the years of maturity, is the gift of education.
-
When a man dies he clutches in his hands only that which he has given away during his lifetime.
-
I also realized that the philosophers, far from ridding me of my vain doubts, only multiplied the doubts that tormented me and failed to remove any one of them. So I chose another guide and said, Let me follow the Inner Light; it will not lead me so far astray as others have done, or if it does it will be my own fault, and I shall not go so far wrong if I follow my own illusions as if I trusted to their deceits.
-
To renounce freedom is to renounce one's humanity, one's rights as a man and equally one's duties.
-
Many men, seemingly impelled by fortune, hasten forward to meet misfortune half way.
-
But in some great souls, who consider themselves as citizens of the world, and forcing the imaginary barriers that separate people from people.
-
There is not a single ill-doer who could not be turned to some good.
-
I was not much afraid of punishment, I was only afraid of disgrace.But that I feared more than death, more than crime, more than anything in the world. I should have rejoiced if the earth had swallowed me up and stifled me in the abyss. But my invincible sense of shame prevailed over everything . It was my shame that made me impudent, and the more wickedly I behaved the bolder my fear of confession made me. I saw nothing but the horror of being found out, of being publicly proclaimed, to my face, as a thief, as a liar, and slanderer.
-
The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had some one pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: "Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!
-
It is hard to prevent oneself from believing what one so keenly desires, and who can doubt that the interest we have in admitting or denying the reality of the Judgement to come determines the faith of most men in accordance with their hopes and fears.
-
Liberty is not to be found in any form of government; she is in the heart of the free man; he bears her with him everywhere.
-
Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.
-
The world is woman's book. [Fr., Le monde est le livre des femmes.]
-
Liberty is obedience to the law which one has laid down for oneself
-
He who pretends to look on death without fear lies. All men are afraid of dying, this is the great law of sentient beings, without which the entire human species would soon be destroyed.
-
There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character.
-
Hatred, as well as love, renders its votaries credulous.
-
Every artists wants to be applauded
-
That which renders life burdensome to us generally arises from the abuse of it.
-
A citizen should render to the state all the services he can as soon as the sovereign demands them.