Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes
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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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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 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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It is always a poor way of reading the hearts of others to try to conceal our own. [Fr., C'est toujours un mauvais moyen de lire dans le coeur des autres que d'affecter de cacher le sien.]
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The strength of the people is effective only if it is concentrated; it evaporates and is lost when it is dispersed, just as gunpowder scattered on the ground ignites only grain by grain.
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Truth is an homage that the good man pays to his own dignity.
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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 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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I had been brought up in a church which decides everything and permits no doubts, so that having rejected one article of faith I was forced to reject the rest.
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The indifference of children towards meat is one proof that the taste for meat is unnatural; their preference is for vegetable foods...Beware of changing this natural taste and making children flesh-eaters, if not for their health's sake, for the sake of their character; for how can one explain away the fact that great meat-eaters are usually fiercer and more cruel than other men; this has been recognised at all times and in all places.
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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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Le remords s'endort durant un destin prospère et s'aigrit dans l'adversité.
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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.
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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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By doing good we become good.
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The empire of woman is an empire of softness, of address, of complacency. Her commands are caresses, her menaces are tears.
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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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Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.
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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 may not be better than other people, but at least I'm different.
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Generally we obtain very surely and very speedily what we are not too anxious to obtain.
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Whoever blushes is already guilty; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.
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It is well known that a loose and easy dress contributes much to give to both sexes those fine proportions of body that are observable in the Grecian statues, and which serve as models to our present artists.
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Whoever refuses to obey the general will will be forced to do so by the entire body; this means merely that he will be forced to be free.