Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes
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The man who meditates is a depraved animal.
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How many famous and high-spirited heroes have lived a day too long?
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I may be no better, but at least I am different.
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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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I have always said and felt that true enjoyment can not be described.
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There exists one book, which, to my taste, furnishes the happiest treatise of natural education. What then is this marvelous book? Is it Aristotle? Is it Pliny, is it Buffon? No-it is Robinson Crusoe.
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In the North the first words are, Help me; in the South, Love me.
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By doing good we become good.
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We do not know what really good or bad fortune is.
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The animals you eat are not those who devour others; you do not eat the carnivorous beasts, you take them as your pattern. You only hunger for the sweet and gentle creatures which harm no one, which follow you, serve you, and are devoured by you as the reward of their service.
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Rather suffer an injustice than commit one.
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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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But remain the teacher of the young teachers. Advise and direct us, and we will be ready to learn. I will have need of you as long as I live.
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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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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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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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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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My liveliest delight was in having conquered myself.
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A feeble body weakens the mind.
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Truth is an homage that the good man pays to his own dignity.
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For it is in our nature to endure patiently the decrees of fate, but not the ill-will of others.
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Equality, because without it there can be no liberty.
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The English are predisposed to pride, the French to vanity.
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Childhood has it's own way of seeing, thinking, and feeling, and nothing is more foolish than to try to substitute ours for theirs.