Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes
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An intelligent being, is the active principle of all things. One must have renounced all common sense to doubt it, and it is a waste of time to try to prove such self evident truth.
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Days of absence, sad and dreary,Clothed in sorrow's dark array,-Days of absence, I am weary: She I love is far away.
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The social compact sets up among the citizens as equality of such kind, that they all bind themselves to observe the same conditions and should therefore all enjoy the same rights.
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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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The science of government is only a science of combinations, of applications, and of exceptions, according to times, places and circumstances.
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Whoever blushes is already guilty; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.
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A child who passes through many hands in turn, can never be well brought up. At every change he makes a secret comparison, which continually tends to lessen his respect for those who control him, and with it their authority over him. If once he thinks there are grown-up people with no more sense than children the authority of age is destroyed and his education is ruined.
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I have always said and felt that true enjoyment can not be described.
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Men, in general, are not this or that, they are what they are made to be.
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Gratitude is a duty which ought to be paid, but which none have a right to expect.
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Why should we build our happiness on the opinons of others, when we can find it in our own hearts?
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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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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 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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Generally we obtain very surely and very speedily what we are not too anxious to obtain.
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Love, known to the person by whom it is inspired, becomes more bearable.
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Le remords s'endort durant un destin prospère et s'aigrit dans l'adversité.
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Rather suffer an injustice than commit one.
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Teach him to live rather than to avoid death: life is not breath, but action, the use of our senses, our mind, our faculties, every part of ourselves which makes us conscious of our being. Life consists less in length of days than in the keen sense of living. A man maybe buried at a hundred and may never have lived at all. He would have fared better had he died young.
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A feeble body weakens the mind.
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How many famous and high-spirited heroes have lived a day too long?
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The mind grows narrow in proportion as the soul grows corrupt.
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Girls must be thwarted early in life.
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I love idleness. I love to busy myself about trifles, to begin a hundred things and not finish one of them, to come and go as my fancy bids me, to change my plan every moment, to follow a fly in all its circlings, to try and uproot a rock to see what is underneath, eagerly to begin a ten-years' task to give it up after ten minutes: in short, to fritter away the whole day inconsequentially and incoherently, and to follow nothing but the whim of the moment.