Top 100 Jacques Rousseau Quotes
#1. He who pretends to look on death without fear lies. All men are afraid of dying, this is the great law of sentient beings, without which the entire human species would soon be destroyed.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778)
French philosopher and writer.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#2. The star is the ultimate American verification of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile. His mere existence proves the perfectability of any man or woman. Oh wonderful pliability of human nature, in a society where anyone can become a celebrity! And where any celebrity ... may become a star!
Daniel J. Boorstin
#3. The only dance masters I could have were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman and Nietzsche.
Isadora Duncan
#4. The artist must be a philosopher. Socrates the skilled sculptor, Jean-Jacques [Rousseau] the good musician, and the immortal Poussin, tracing on the canvas the sublime lessons of philosophy, are so many proofs that an artistic genius should have no other guide except the torch of reason.
Jacques-Louis David
#5. When I stay in one Place,
I can hardly think at all;
my body had to be on the move to set my mind going.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#6. Active people don't change the world profoundly; ideas do. Napoleon is less important in world history than Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Michel Houellebecq
#7. However, it was the great 18th century social philosophers John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau who brought the concept of a social contract between citizens and governments sharply into political thinking, paving the way for popular democracy and constitutional republicanism.
Simon Mainwaring
#9. One does not drink. One gives a kiss to his glass, and the wine returns a caress to you.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#11. What good is it looking for our happiness in the opinion of others if we can find it in ourselves?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#12. If all were perfect Christians, individuals would do their duty; the people would be obedient to the laws, the magistrates incorrupt, and there would be neither vanity nor luxury in such a state.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#13. 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
#16. A feeble body makes a feeble mind. I do not know what doctors cure us of, but I know this: they infect us with very deadly diseases, cowardice, timidity, credulity, the fear of death. What matter if they make the dead walk, we have no need of corpses; they fail to give us men, and it is men we need.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#17. When one has suffered or fears suffering, one pities those who suffer; but when one is suffering, one pities only oneself.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#18. As long as there are rich people in the world, they will be desirous of distinguishing themselves from the poor.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#19. When a man dies he clutches in his hands only that which he has given away during his lifetime.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#20. Government originated in the attempt to find a form of association that defends and protects the person and property of each with the common force of all.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#21. It is difficult for an education in which the heart is involved to remain forever lost.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#25. Heroes are not known by the loftiness of their carriage; the greatest braggarts are generally the merest cowards.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#26. The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#28. Whatever may be our natural talents, the art of writing is not acquired all at once.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#29. 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.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#30. Well, the truth is no road to fortune, and the populace doesn't give
out ambassadorships, university chairs, or pensions.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#31. To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#34. 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
#37. I became the stage for the great argument between Nietzsche and Rousseau. I was the extra ready to take on all the roles.
Jacques Derrida
#38. But in some great souls, who consider themselves as citizens of the world, and forcing the imaginary barriers that separate people from people ...
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#41. I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind works only with my legs.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#42. A paralyzed man who wants to walk OR an agile man who does not want to walk will both remain neutral in nature.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#44. Gracefulness cannot subsist without ease; delicacy is not debility; nor must a woman be sick in order to please. Infirmity, and sickness may excite our pity, but desire and pleasure require the bloom and vigor of health.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#45. Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#49. When something an affliction happens to you, you either let it defeat you, or you defeat it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#51. Like Rousseau, whom he resembles even more than he resembles Voltaire , Shaw never gave a social form to his assertiveness, never desired to arrive and to assimilate himself, or wield authority as of right.
Jacques Barzun
#52. However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#54. As she put it, she knew of nothing so ravishing as having a child whom she could whip whenever she was in a bad mood.
("The Queen Fantasque")
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#55. I feel an indescribable ecstasy and delirium in melting, as it were, into the system of being, in identifying myself with the whole of nature..
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#56. To write a love letter, you have to start, without knowing, what you want to say, and end, without knowing what you have said.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#58. The man is best served who has no occasion to put the hands of others at the end of his own arms.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#61. Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping from them.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#63. Man's first law is to watch over his own preservation; his first care he owes to himself; and as soon as he reaches the age of reason, he becomes the only judge of the best means to preserve himself; he becomes his own master.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#64. There is one further distinguishing characteristic of man which is very specific indeed and about which there can be no dispute, and that is the faculty of self-improvement - a faculty which, with the help of circumstance, progressively develops all our other faculties.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#65. 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
#67. 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
#69. Liberty is like rich food and strong wine: the strong natures accustomed to them thrive and grow even stronger on them; but they deplete, inebriate and destroy the weak.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#70. In a well governed state, there are few punishments, not because there are many pardons, but because criminals are rare; it is when a state is in decay that the multitude of crimes is a guarantee of impunity.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#71. The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#72. Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to save time, but to squander it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#73. Childhood has its own way of seeing, thinking, and feeling, and nothing is more foolish than to try to substitute ours for theirs.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#76. One may live tranquilly in a dungeon; but does life consist in living quietly?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#77. People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#78. If there were a nation of Gods, it would govern itself democratically. A government so perfect is not suited to men.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#79. The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying 'this is mine', and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#81. The falsification of history has done more to impede human development than any one thing known to mankind.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#84. 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.]
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#86. The world is the book of women. Whatever knowledge they may possess is more commonly acquired by observation than by reading.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#88. For it is in our nature to endure patiently the decrees of fate, but not the ill-will of others.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#89. In addition to all that, a man may have any opinions he likes without that being any of the sovereign's business. Having no standing in the other world, the sovereign has no concern with what may lie in wait for its subjects in the life to come, provided they are good citizens in this life.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#90. 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
#91. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#92. Generally we obtain very surely and very speedily what we are not too anxious to obtain.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#93. The taste for splendor is hardly ever combined in the same souls with the taste for the honorable.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#94. 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
#96. I had brought from Paris the national prejudice against Italian music; but I had also received from nature that acute sensibility against which prejudices are powerless. I soon contracted the passion it inspires in all those born to understand it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#97. 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
#99. 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
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