Top 100 Quotes About Rousseau
#2. One does not drink. One gives a kiss to his glass, and the wine returns a caress to you.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#4. What good is it looking for our happiness in the opinion of others if we can find it in ourselves?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#5. 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
#6. 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
#9. 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
#10. Lord Chesterfield advises his son "to speak often, but not to speak much at a time; so that if he does not please, he will not at least displease to any great extent."
Rousseau tells us, that, "persons who know little, talk a great deal, while those who know a great deal say very little.
Arthur Martine
#11. When one has suffered or fears suffering, one pities those who suffer; but when one is suffering, one pities only oneself.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#12. As long as there are rich people in the world, they will be desirous of distinguishing themselves from the poor.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#13. When a man dies he clutches in his hands only that which he has given away during his lifetime.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#14. 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
#15. It is difficult for an education in which the heart is involved to remain forever lost.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#18. Neither Rousseau nor Robespierre was capable of dreaming of a goodness beyond virtue, just as they were unable to imagine that radical evil would 'partake nothing of the sordid or sensual' (Melville), that there could be wickedness beyond vice.
Hannah Arendt
#20. Heroes are not known by the loftiness of their carriage; the greatest braggarts are generally the merest cowards.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#21. 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
#22. Yes, I can understand that a man might go to gambling table - when he sees that all that lies between himself and death is his last crown
Honore De Balzac
#23. Capitalism, gaudy and greedy, has been inherent in western aesthetics from ancient Egypt on. It is the mysticism and glamour of things , which take on a personality of their own. As an economic system, it is in the Darwinian line of Sade, not Rousseau.
Camille Paglia
#25. Whatever may be our natural talents, the art of writing is not acquired all at once.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#26. 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
#27. Well, the truth is no road to fortune, and the populace doesn't give
out ambassadorships, university chairs, or pensions.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#28. 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
#29. Officers in command of colored troops are in constant habit of pressing all able-bodied slaves into the military service of the U.S.
Lovell Rousseau
#33. 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. Despite hating mobs and technically being a nobleman, Napoleon welcomed the Revolution. At least in its early stages it accorded well with the Enlightenment ideals he had ingested from his reading of Rousseau and Voltaire.
Andrew Roberts
#45. 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
#46. There are two ways to make a man richer, reasoned Rousseau: give him more money or curb his desires.
Alain De Botton
#47. Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#51. When something an affliction happens to you, you either let it defeat you, or you defeat it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#53. 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
#54. However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#55. the instinct Rousseau found in himself and followed: the instinct to deceive, rob, and seduce rich ladies and to abandon his own children.
Peter Kreeft
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. And Anwin said, "It turned out just as an enchantment should."
"But Anwin, it wasn't an enchantment really, it just - "
"Yes, child, it was the greatest enchantment of all." He winked at the prince. "Gillie understood all along what the enchantment was.
Shirley Rousseau Murphy
#60. 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
#61. Rousseau defined civilizations as when people build fences.
Haruki Murakami
#63. 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
#66. Each State can have for enemies only other States, and not men; for between things disparate in nature there can be no real relation.
Jean-Baptiste Rousseau
#67. Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping from them.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#69. [Rousseau] has not had the precaution to throw any veil over his sentiments; and as he scorns to dissemble his contempt of established opinions, he could not wonder that all the zealots were in arms against him.
David Hume
#70. 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
#71. Astronomy was born of superstition; eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood, and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; and even moral philosophy of human pride. Thus the arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices.
Jean-Baptiste Rousseau
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free. Once more a humanistic utopianism ends in tyranny, whether in Rousseau's writing or in the Reign of Terror which carried his position to its conclusion. Robespierre,
Francis A. Schaeffer
#76. Rousseau and his disciples were resolved to force men to be free; in most of the world, they triumphed; men are set free from family, church, town, class, guild; yet they wear, instead, the chains of the state, and they expire of ennui or stifling lone lines.
Russell Kirk
#77. 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
#79. 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
#80. God created man in his own image. And man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.
Henri Rousseau
#81. 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
#82. The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#84. 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
#85. 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
#87. Rousseau pounced. Men who dislike cats were tyrannical: They do not like cats because the cat is free and will never consent to become a slave.
Robert Zaretsky
#89. One may live tranquilly in a dungeon; but does life consist in living quietly?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#90. People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#91. If there were a nation of Gods, it would govern itself democratically. A government so perfect is not suited to men.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#92. 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
#93. Were there a people of gods, their government would be democratic. So perfect a government is not for men.
Jean-Baptiste Rousseau
#95. The falsification of history has done more to impede human development than any one thing known to mankind.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#98. 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
#100. If a king tries to start a war, a mother should go to him and forbid it.
Henri Rousseau
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