Top 100 Rousseau's Quotes
#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. 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
#68. 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
#69. Dulcie said there were no cats in the Bible, but Kit wasn't sure she believed that. Why would there be horses and cows and dogs, wild pigs and weasels, but no cats? Why, when everyone knew that a little cat would have to be God's favorite?
Shirley Rousseau Murphy
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. It's the accent. Women always swoon for an accent." I rolled my eyes.
"And does the accent work on you?
Nichole Chase
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. Nature's instructions are always slow; those of men are generally premature.
Henri Rousseau
#76. 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
#77. In any real democracy, magistracy isn't a benefit - it's a burdensome responsibility that can't fairly be imposed on one individual rather than another
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#78. The fact that Man is Nature's perverse instantiation can only lead to the appalling conclusion that Man, too, is some kind of an artificial intelligence
Stephan Attia
#79. Then what explains war among states? Rousseau's answer is really that war occurs because there is nothing to prevent it.
Kenneth Waltz
#80. I have never thought, for my part, that man's freedom consists in his being able to do whatever he wills, but that he should not, by any human power, be forced to do what is against his will.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#82. This poem will never reach its destination. On Rousseau's Ode To Posterity
Voltaire
#83. Somehow Chinese toxins fit right in with the Don's taste in gear. Austrian shotgun shells, Cuban baseball bats, Israeli silencers, Russian things he could only guess at - the Don was known for his upscale mob accessories.
Bruce Rousseau
#85. It is in man's heart that the life of nature's spectacle exists; to see it, one must feel it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#86. I have never believed that man's freedom consisted in doing what he wants, but rather in never doing what he does not want to do.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. The most absolute authority is that which penetrates into a man's innermost being and concerns itself no less with his will than with his actions.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. Days of absence, sad and dreary,
Clothed in sorrow's dark array, -
Days of absence, I am weary;
She I love is far away.
Poetic Verse by
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#94. Confusion has always surrounded Rousseau's political ideas because he was in many respects an inconsistent and contradictory
Paul Johnson
#95. Whether the woman shares the man's passion or not, whether she is willing or unwilling to satisfy it, she always repulses him and defends herself, though not always with the same vigour, and therefore not always with the same success.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#96. You shall have," Gillie said, "the king's bread and goat milk."
"The magical goat milk?"
"The same."
"Will it make me beautiful?"
"It cannot. You are already that.
Shirley Rousseau Murphy
#97. 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
#98. Remorse goes to sleep during a prosperous period and wakes up in adversity.
[Fr., Le remords s'endort durant un destin prospere et s'aigrit dans l'adversite.]
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#99. Being wealthy isn't just a question of having lots of money. It's a question of what we want. Wealth isn't an absolute, it's relative to desire. Every time we seek something that we can't afford, we can be counted as poor, how much money we may actually have.
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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