Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes
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All that time is lost which might be better employed.
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O love, if I regret the age when one savors you, it is not for the hour of pleasure, but for the one that follows it.
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Our greatest misfortunes come to us from ourselves.
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Take from the philosopher the pleasure of being heard and his desire for knowledge ceases.
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Every man has a right to risk his own life for the preservation of it.
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To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.
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He thinks like a philosopher, but governs like a king.
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Plants are shaped by cultivation and men by education. .. We are born weak, we need strength; we are born totally unprovided, we need aid; we are born stupid, we need judgment. Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given us by education.
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To make a man richer, give him more money of curb his desires.
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It is to law alone that men owe justice and liberty. It is this salutary organ, of the will of all which establishes in civil rights the natural equality between men. It is this celestial voice which dictates to each citizen the precepts of public reason, and teaches him to act according to the rules of his own judgment and not to behave inconsistently with himself. It is with this voice alone that political leaders should speak when. they command.
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Girls must be thwarted early in life.
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I am not made like any of those I have seen. I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different.
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It is easier to conquer than to administer. With enough leverage, a finger could overturn the world; but to support the world, one must have the shoulders of Hercules.
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Men, in general, are not this or that, they are what they are made to be.
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Many men, seemingly impelled by fortune, hasten forward to meet misfortune half way.
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It is not possible for minds degraded by a host of trivial concerns to ever rise to anything great.
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I may be no better, but at least I am different.
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A person who can break wind is not dead.
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[When anything happens, we interpret it as good or bad, but...] We do not know what is really good or bad fortune. [Only the future can decide. For example, what appears to be bad today may in fact lead us to a greater good tomorrow and by the very act of thinking and planning in that positive way, we can help make that good future come true.]
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To try to conceal our own heart is a bad means to read that of others.
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In truth, laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to those who have nothing; from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all possess something and none has too much.
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The man is best served who has no occasion to put the hands of others at the end of his own arms.
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The man who gets the most out of life is not the one who has lived it longest, but the one who has felt life most deeply.
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The want of occupation is no less the plague of society than of solitude.