Top 100 Rousseau Is Quotes
#1. [Rousseau is] the person whom I most revere both for the Force of [his] Genius and the Greatness of [his] mind [ ... ]
David Hume
#2. 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
#5. What good is it looking for our happiness in the opinion of others if we can find it in ourselves?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#6. 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
#7. When one has suffered or fears suffering, one pities those who suffer; but when one is suffering, one pities only oneself.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#8. It is difficult for an education in which the heart is involved to remain forever lost.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. Whatever may be our natural talents, the art of writing is not acquired all at once.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#14. 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
#15. Well, the truth is no road to fortune, and the populace doesn't give
out ambassadorships, university chairs, or pensions.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#16. 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
#18. 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
#22. 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
#23. Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#26. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. If there were a nation of Gods, it would govern itself democratically. A government so perfect is not suited to men.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#39. 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
#40. Were there a people of gods, their government would be democratic. So perfect a government is not for men.
Jean-Baptiste Rousseau
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. The world is the book of women. Whatever knowledge they may possess is more commonly acquired by observation than by reading.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#46. For it is in our nature to endure patiently the decrees of fate, but not the ill-will of others.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#47. 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
#48. The taste for splendor is hardly ever combined in the same souls with the taste for the honorable.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#49. 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
#51. 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
#53. 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
#55. To this motive which encourages me is added another which made up my mind: after I have upheld, according to my natural intelligence, the side of truth, no matter what success I have, there is a prize which I cannot fail to win. I will find it in the depths of my heart.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#56. We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man's estate, is the gift of education.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#58. Every man having been born free and master of himself, no one else may under any pretext whatever subject him without his consent. To assert that the son of a slave is born a slave is to assert that he is not born a man.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#59. 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
#60. Money is the seed of money, and the first guinea is sometimes more difficult to acquire than the second million.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#61. We seek knowledge only because we desire enjoyment, and it is impossible to conceive why a person who has neither desires nor fears would take the trouble to reason.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#63. Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is; the people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived ... (Bk2:3)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#64. Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#65. 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
#67. The wisest writers devote themselves to what a man ought to know, without asking what a child is capable of learning.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#69. Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#70. All wickedness comes from weakness. The child is wicked only because he is weak. Make him strong; he will be good. He who could do everything would never do harm.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. Plants are shaped by cultivation and men by education.. We are born weak, we need strength; we are born totally unprovided, we need aid; we are born stupid, we need judgment. Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given us by education.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#76. The political body, therefore, is also a moral being which has a will; and this general will, which tends always to the conservation and well-being of the whole and of each part of it ... is, for all members of the state ... the rule of what is just or unjust.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#77. Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#79. Man's first language, the most universal, the most energetic and the only language he needed before it was necessary to persuade men assembled together, is the cry of nature.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#80. It has always pleased me to read while eating if I have no companion; it gives me the society I lack. I devour alternately a page and a mouthful; it is as though my book were dining with me.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#81. In the strict sense of the term, a true democracy has never existed, and never will exist. It is against natural order that the great number should govern and that the few should be governed.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#82. The only moral lesson which is suited for a child
the most important lesson for every time of life
is this: 'Never hurt anybody.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#84. Teach by doing whenever you can, and only fall back upon words when doing it is out of the question.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#85. 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
#86. Joy is my character,
tis the fault of Voltaire.
Misery is my trousseau,
tis the fault of Rousseau.
Gavroche
Victor Hugo
#87. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#91. It is by the activity of our passions, that our reason improves: we covet knowledge merely because we covet enjoyment, and it is impossible to conceive why a man exempt from fears and desires should take the trouble to reason.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#93. The first step towards vice is to shroud innocent actions in mystery, and whoever likes to conceal something sooner or later has reason to conceal it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#94. To live in darkness is to surrender to madness, to hide behind light is to ignore the blight, walk the road between and your worries will go unseen.
Ryan J Rousseau
#95. If we assume man has been corrupted by an artificial civilization, what is the natural state? the state of nature from which he has been removed? imagine, wandering up and down the forest without industry, without speech, and without home.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#96. The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#97. We do not know either unalloyed happiness or unmitigated misfortune. Everything in this world is a tangled yarn; we taste nothing in its purity; we do not remain two moments in the same state. Our affections as well as bodies, are in a perpetual flux.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#98. That man is truly free who desires what he is able to perform, and does what he desires.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#99. 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
#100. The principal problem I had during the five years I ran the Caisse - and I bet you that it will be the same problem for my successor - is the retention, recruitment and training of competent personnel.
Henri Rousseau
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