Top 100 Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes
#1. In all the ills that befall us, we are more concerned by the intention than the result. A tile that falls off a roof may injure us more seriously, but it will not wound us so deeply as a stone thrown deliberately by a malevolent hand. The blow may miss, but the intention always strikes home.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#3. Heroes are not known by the loftiness of their carriage; the greatest braggarts are generally the merest cowards.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#5. Whatever may be our natural talents, the art of writing is not acquired all at once.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#6. Whence do I get my rules of conduct? I find them in my heart. Whatever I feel to be good is good. Whatever I feel to be evil is evil. Conscience is the best of casuists.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#12. An animal, at the end of a few months, is what it will be all its life; and its species, at the end of a thousand years, is what it was in the first of those thousand years. Why is man alone subject to becoming an imbecile?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#14. Every free action has two causes that come together to produce it. One is moral, the will that determines the act; the other is physical, the power that executes the will to act.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#15. The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#16. One may live tranquilly in a dungeon; but does life consist in living quietly?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#17. People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#20. 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?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#21. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#22. Generally we obtain very surely and very speedily what we are not too anxious to obtain.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#23. 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.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#24. Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#25. One advantage resulting from good actions is that they elevate the soul to a disposition of attempting still better; for such is human weakness, that we must place among our good deeds an abstinence from those crimes we are tempted to commit.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#28. The "sociable" man, always outside himself, is capable of living only in the opinions of others and, so to speak, derives the sentiment of his own existence solely from their judgment.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#31. Savage man, once he has eaten, is at peace with all of nature and the friend of all his fellow humans. Is
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#34. So finally we tumble into the abyss, we ask God why he has made us so feeble. But, in spite of ourselves, He replies through our consciences: 'I have made you too feeble to climb out of the pit, because i made you strong enough not to fall in.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#35. Supreme happiness consists in self-content; that we may gain this self-content, we are placed upon this earth and endowed with freedom.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#36. Not all the subtilties of metaphysics can make me doubt a moment of the immortality of the soul, and of a beneficent Providence. I feel it, I believe it, I desire it, I hope it, and will defend it to my last breath.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#37. Force is a physical power; I do not see how its effects could produce morality. To yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will; it is at best an act of prudence. In what sense can it be a moral duty?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#38. The ever-recurring law of necessity soon teaches a man to do what he does not like, so as to avert evils which he would dislike still more ... this foresight, well or ill used, is the source of all the wisdom or the wretchedness of mankind.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#39. The worst education is to leave him floating between his will and yours, and to dispute endlessly between you and him as to which of the two will be the master.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#42. The abuse of books kills science. Believing that we know what we have read, we believe that we can dispense with learning it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#43. I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#45. If force compels obedience, there is no need to invoke a duty to obey, and if force ceases to compel obedience, there is no longer any obligation.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#46. Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given to us by education.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#48. 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.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#49. War then, is a relation - not between man and man but between state and state and individuals are enemies only accidentally not as men, nor even as citizens but as soldiers not as members of their country, but as its defenders
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#51. It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#52. Each member of the community gives himself to it at the instant of its constitution, just as he actually is, himself and all his forces, including all goods in his possession.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#53. There is no subjection so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#55. Chemistry ... is like the maid occupied with daily civilisation; she is busy with fertilisers, medicines, glass, insecticides ... for she dispenses the recipes.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#56. I remembered the way out suggested by a great princess when told that the peasants had no bread: "Well, let them eat cake".
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#57. The French painter Rousseau was once asked why he put a naked woman on a red sofa in the middle of his jungle pictures. He answered, 'I needed a bit of red there.'
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#58. Ah,' thought the king sadly, shrugging his shoulders, "I see clearly that if one has a crazy wife, one cannot avoid being a fool.'
("Queen Fantasque")
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#59. The tone of good conversation is brilliant and natural; it is neither tedious nor frivolous; it is instructive without pedantry, gay without tumultuousness, polished without affectation, gallant without insipidity, waggish without equivocation.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#61. People in their natural state are basically good. But this natural innocence,however, is corrupted by the evils of society.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#62. The good man can be proud of his virtue because it is his. But of what is the intelligent man proud?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#63. Our sweetest existence is relative and collective and our true self is not entirely in us. Such is man's constitution in this life that he never succeeds in truly enjoying himself without the help of other people.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#64. Do not base your life on the judgments of others; first, because they are as likely to be mistaken as you are, and further, because you cannot know that they are telling you their true thoughts.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#66. Do to others as you would have others do to you, inspires all men with that other maxim of natural goodness a great deal less perfect, but perhaps more useful: Do good to yourself with as little prejudice as you can to others.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#67. The writings of women are always cold and pretty like themselves. There is as much wit as you may desire, but never any soul.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#71. More than half of my life is past; I have left only the time I need for turning the rest of it to account and for effacing my errors by my virtues.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#72. To live is not merely to breathe; it is to act; it is to make use of our organs, senses, faculties - of all those parts of ourselves which give us the feeling of existence.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#74. The infant, on opening his eyes, ought to see his country, and to the hour of his death never lose sight of it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#75. Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#77. Presence of mind, penetration, fine observation, are the sciences of women; ability to avail themselves of these is their talent.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#78. Men will argue more philosophically about the human heart; but women will read the heart of man better than they.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#79. I can discover nothing in any mere animal but an ingenious machine, to which nature has given senses to wind itself up, and guard, to a certain degree, against everything that might destroy or disorder it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#80. The opportunity of making happy is more scarce than we imagine; the punishment of missing it is, never to meet with it again; and the use we make of it leaves us an eternal sentiment of satisfaction or repentance.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#82. How could I become wicked, when I had nothing but examples of gentleness before my eyes, and none around me but the best people in the world?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#83. To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn, and that which he will have the most need to know.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#84. What good would it be to possess the whole universe if one were its only survivor?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#85. The Despot is Master only as long as he is the strongest, and as soon as he can be driven out he cannot protest against violence. The uprising that ends by strangling or dethroning a Sultan is as Lawful an act as those by which he disposed, the day before, of the lives and goods of his Subjects.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#86. I have somewhere read of a wise bishop who in a visit to his diocese found an old woman whose only prayer consisted in the single interjection "Oh!-
"Good mother" said he to her, "continue to pray in this manner; your prayer is better than ours." This better prayer is mine also.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#88. Love childhood, indulge its sports, its pleasures, its delightful instincts. Who has not sometimes regretted that age when laughter was ever on the lips, and when the heart was ever at peace?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#89. Her dignity consists in being unknown to the world; her glory is in the esteem of her husband; her pleasures in the happiness of her family.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#92. 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.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#93. How many centuries must have elapsed before men reached the point of seeing any other fire than that in the sky?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#94. What conclusion is to be drawn from this paradox so worthy of being born in our time; and what will become of virtue when one has to get rich at all cost?
The ancient political thinkers forever spoke of morals and of virtue; ours speak only of commerce and money.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#95. Do you not know ... that a child badly taught is farther from being wise than one not taught at all?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#96. Singing and dancing alone will not advance one in the world.
[Fr., Qui bien chante et bien danse fait un metier qui peu avance.]
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#97. 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?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#98. What, then, is the government? An intermediary body established between the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual communication, a body charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance of freedom, both civil and political.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#99. Many men, seemingly impelled by fortune, hasten forward to meet misfortune half way.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#100. To renounce freedom is to renounce one's humanity, one's rights as a man and equally one's duties.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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