Top 100 Quotes About Rousseau
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. There are two ways to make a man richer, reasoned Rousseau: give him more money or curb his desires.
Alain De Botton
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. Rousseau defined civilizations as when people build fences.
Haruki Murakami
#10. [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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#15. 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
#16. The man who would have no imitators had legions of them, each infected with the mimetic dilemma that Rousseau personified: how to get others to notice how disinterested one is in whether they notice or not.
Paul C. Vitz
#17. The real social contract, (Edmund Burke) argued, was not Rousseau's social contract between the noble savage and the General Will, but a "partnership" between the present generation and future generations.
Niall Ferguson
#18. Rousseau. - Although this politician, the paramount authority of the Democrats, makes the social edifice rest upon the general will, no one has so completely admitted the hypothesis of the entire passiveness of human nature in the presence of the lawgiver: - "If
Frederic Bastiat
#19. Qu'ils mangent de la brioche. Let them eat cake. On being told that her people had no bread. Attributed to Marie-Antoinette, but remark is much older. Rousseau refers in his Confessions, 1740, to a similar remark, as a well-known saying. Others attribute the remark to the wife of Louis XIV.
Marie Antoinette
#20. 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
#21. Joy is my character,
tis the fault of Voltaire.
Misery is my trousseau,
tis the fault of Rousseau.
Gavroche
Victor Hugo
#22. Universities are no longer educational in any sense of the word that Rousseau would have recognised. Instead, they have become unabashed instruments of capital. Confronted with this squalid betrayal, one imagines he would have felt sick and oppressed.
Terry Eagleton
#23. How do you keep all the balls you got dancing in the air from crashing down on your fucking head, Rousseau?"
"Centuries of practice?
Heather R. Blair
#24. Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains!" Rousseau saw the primitive as innocent and autonomous freedom as the final good. We
Francis A. Schaeffer
#25. For even the ordinary well-read person, the French Enlightenment is largely restricted to the three big-name philosophes: Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire.
Michael Dirda
#26. We remain in the Romantic cycle initiated by Rousseau: liberal idealism canceled by violence, barbarism, disillusionment and cynicism.
Camille Paglia
#27. Then what explains war among states? Rousseau's answer is really that war occurs because there is nothing to prevent it.
Kenneth Waltz
#28. Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp.
Thomas A. Edison
#29. The only dance masters I could have were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman and Nietzsche.
Isadora Duncan
#30. I would like to be a great artist. I would quit pitching if I could paint like Monet or Rousseau. But I can't. What I can do is pitch, and I can do that very well.
Tom Seaver
#31. There once was a man called Rousseau who wrote a book containing nothing but ideas. The second edition was bound in the skins of those who laughed at the first.
Benjamin Wiker
#32. This poem will never reach its destination. On Rousseau's Ode To Posterity
Voltaire
#33. 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
#34. For my part, I prefer the ontological argument, the cosmological argument and the rest of the old stock-in-trade, to the sentimental illogicality that has sprung from Rousseau.
Bertrand Russell
#35. in 1762, Rousseau argued that puberty had such fundamental emotional and mental effects that it represented "a second birth.
Jon Savage
#36. For Rousseau and Mandeville the absence of a moral instinct meant the laws of society had no moral validity, they were nothing but the inventions of the cunning and the powerful, in order to maintain or to acquire an unnatural and unjust superiority over the rest of their fellow creatures.
Gertrude Himmelfarb
#37. Since [Rousseau's] time, and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and, for purposes of model, to become a manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes. The object of study is the garment, not the figure.
Henry Adams
#38. Why did you paint a couch in the middle of the jungle?"
Rousseau: "Because one has a right to paint one's dreams.
Henri Rousseau
#39. There is no doubt that people are in the long run what the government make out of them . . . ," Adams read in Rousseau. "The government ought to be what the people make it," he wrote in response. At
David McCullough
#40. Cats exercise ... a magic influence upon highly developed men of intellect. This is why these long-tailed Graces of the animal kingdom, these adorable, scintillating electric batteries have been the favorite animal of a Mohammed, Cardinal Richlieu, Crebillon, Rousseau, Wieland.
Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch
#41. It was part of Rousseau's vanity that he believed himself incapable of base emotions. 'I feel too superior to hate.' 'I love myself too much to hate anybody.
Paul Johnson
#42. The biggest mischief in the past century has been perpetrated by Rousseau with his doctrine of the goodness of human nature. The mob and the intellectuals derived from it the vision of a Golden Age which would arrive without fail once the noble human race could act according to its whims.
Jacob Burckhardt
#43. 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
#44. In his Social Contract, Rousseau noted the obvious, that Law is a very good thing for men with property and a very bad thing for men without property.
Saul D. Alinsky
#45. [Rousseau is] the person whom I most revere both for the Force of [his] Genius and the Greatness of [his] mind [ ... ]
David Hume
#46. Rousseau identified reason as the disease for which it pretended to be the cure.
Robert Zaretsky
#47. Confusion has always surrounded Rousseau's political ideas because he was in many respects an inconsistent and contradictory
Paul Johnson
#48. Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we shall know everything the 18th century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.
Randall Jarrell
#49. The Republic of Plato is also the first treatise upon education, of which the writings of Milton and Locke, Rousseau, Jean Paul, and Goethe are the legitimate descendants.
Plato
#50. Out of his zestful study of Man, from Thucydides to the Encyclopaedists, from Seneca to Rousseau, he had confirmed into an unassailable conviction his earliest conscious impressions of the general insanity of his own species.
Rafael Sabatini
#51. The presence of cats exercises such a magic influence upon highly organized men of intellect. This is why these long-tailed Graces of the animal kingdom ... have been the favorite animal of a Mahommed, Cardinal Richelieu, Crebillon, Rousseau, Wieland.
Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch
#52. Legitimacy is the elixir of political power. "The strongest is never strong enough to be the master", Jean-Jaques Rousseau observed, "unless he translates strength into right and obedience into duty". Only democracy has that authority in the world today.
Fareed Zakaria
#53. 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
#54. Rousseau introduced the idea of false needs, and showed how the systems we live in work against our growing up: they dazzle us with toys and bewilder us with so many trivial products that we are too busy making silly choices to remember that the adult ones are made by others.
Susan Neiman
#55. There are two ways to make people richer, reasoned Rousseau: to give them more money or to restrain their desires.
Alain De Botton
#56. Break the chains of your body and you will break the chains of your mind." Rousseau
Dianne Whelan
#57. Intellectualism - the conception of man as above all a thinking animal, consciously adapting means to rationally chosen ends - fell sick with Rousseau, took to its bed with Kant, and died with Schopenhauer.
Will Durant
#58. Active people don't change the world profoundly; ideas do. Napoleon is less important in world history than Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Michel Houellebecq
#59. As Rousseau could not compose without his cat beside him, so I cannot play chess without my king's bishop. In its absense the game to me is lifeless and void. The vitalizing factor is missing, and I can devise no plan of attack.
Siegbert Tarrasch
#60. [I]n the past two decades anthropologists have gathered data on life and death in pre-state societies rather than accepting the warm and fuzzy stereotypes. What did they find? In a nutshell: Hobbes was right, Rousseau was wrong.
Steven Pinker
#61. I am very good at my job, Miss Rousseau. I was told to find Samantha Rousseau, and I have. The duchess' reasons are her own." He shrugged. "Of course, falconry is a large sport in our country. Perhaps it has something to do with that.
Nichole Chase
#62. Rousseau ranks among the great educational theorists of the modern era, even if he was the last man to put in charge of a classroom. Young adults, he thought, should be allowed to develop their capabilities in their distinctive way.
Terry Eagleton
#63. It was Rousseau who was largely responsible for the problem by giving currency to the idea that freedom can exist without responsibility and discipline.
Colin Wilson
#64. For if men needed speech in order to learn to think, they had a still greater need for knowing how to think in order to discover the art of speaking - Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#65. Rousseau was mad but influential; Hume was sane but had no followers.
David Hume
#67. 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
#68. One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most.
Walter Pater
#70. One does not drink. One gives a kiss to his glass, and the wine returns a caress to you.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#72. What good is it looking for our happiness in the opinion of others if we can find it in ourselves?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#73. 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
#74. 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
#77. 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
#78. When one has suffered or fears suffering, one pities those who suffer; but when one is suffering, one pities only oneself.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#79. As long as there are rich people in the world, they will be desirous of distinguishing themselves from the poor.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#80. When a man dies he clutches in his hands only that which he has given away during his lifetime.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#81. 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
#82. It is difficult for an education in which the heart is involved to remain forever lost.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#86. Heroes are not known by the loftiness of their carriage; the greatest braggarts are generally the merest cowards.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#87. 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
#88. 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
#90. Whatever may be our natural talents, the art of writing is not acquired all at once.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#91. 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
#92. Well, the truth is no road to fortune, and the populace doesn't give
out ambassadorships, university chairs, or pensions.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#93. 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
#94. 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
#98. 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
