Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes
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There are two things to be considered with regard to any scheme. In the first place, Is it good in itself? In the second, Can it be easily put into practice?
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The mind grows narrow in proportion as the soul grows corrupt.
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Conscience is the voice of the soul, the passions are the voice of the body. It is strange that these voices often contradict each other?
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The want of occupation is no less the plague of society than of solitude.
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Whoever blushes is already guilty; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.
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Rather suffer an injustice than commit one.
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I say to myself: "Who are you to measure infinite power?
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Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.
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The political body, therefore, is also a moral being which has a will; and this general will, which tends always to the conservation and well-being of the whole and of each part of it ... is, for all members of the state ... the rule of what is just or unjust.
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In the North the first words are, Help me; in the South, Love me.
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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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A person who can break wind is not dead.
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Behold the works of our philosophers; with all their pompous diction, how mean and contemptible they are by comparison with the Scriptures! Is it possible that a book at once so simple and sublime should be merely the work of man?
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A blue-stocking is the scourge of her husband, children, friends, servants, and every one. [Fr., Une femme bel-esprit est le fleau de son mari, de ses enfants, de ses amis, de ses valets, et tout le monde.]
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Everything is in constant flux on this earth. Nothing keeps the same unchanging shape, and our affections, being attached to things outside us, necessarily change and pass away as they do. Always out ahead of us or lagging behind, they recall a past which is gone or anticipate a future which may never come into being; there is nothing solid there for the heart to attach itself to. Thus our earthly joys are almost without exception the creatures of a moment.
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All that time is lost which might be better employed.
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Social man lives constantly outside himself.
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Childhood is the sleep of reason. [Fr., L'enfance est le sommeil de la raison.]
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The man who meditates is a depraved animal.
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My bad head cannot adjust itself to the way things are.... If I want to depict spring, it has to be in wintertime; if I want to describe a beautiful landscape, I must be enclosed within walls; and I have said a hundred times that if I were put in the Bastille, there I would paint a picture of liberty.
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I will say little of the importance of a good education; nor will I stop to prove that the current one is bad. Countless others have done so before me, and I do not like to fill a book with things everybody knows. I will note that for the longest time there has been nothing but a cry against the established practice without anyone taking it upon himself to propose a better one. The literature and the learning of our age tend much more to destruction than to edification.
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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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When a man dies he clutches in his hands only that which he has given away during his lifetime.
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No man has any natural authority over his fellow men.