Jean-Jacques Rousseau > Quotes

“People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“What wisdom can you find greater than kindness.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“Every person has a right to risk their own life for the preservation of it.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: Or On Education

“I am not made like any of those I have seen. I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Maker of the world, but degenerates once it gets into the hands of man”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“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, The Social Contract

“Love, known to the person by whom it is inspired, becomes more bearable.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had some one pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: "Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and The Discourses

“It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it. ”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“The truth brings no man a fortune.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“We must powder our wigs; that is why so many poor people have no bread.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“The word ‘slavery’ and ‘right’ are contradictory, they cancel each other out. Whether as between one man and another, or between one man and a whole people, it would always be absurd to say: "I hereby make a covenant with you which is wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; I will respect it so long as I please and you shall respect it as long as I wish.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

“Trust your heart rather than your head.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“Why should we build our happiness on the opinons of others, when we can find it in our own hearts?”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses

“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

“...in respect of riches, no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

“All my misfortunes come of having thought too well of my fellows.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“If there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“Or, rather, let us be more simple and less vain.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“I perceive God everywhere in His works. I sense Him in me; I see Him all around me.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“Freedom is the power to choose our own chains”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“A born king is a very rare being.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

“Teach your scholar to observe the phenomena of nature; you will soon rouse his curiosity, but if you would have it grow, do not be in too great a hurry to satisfy this curiosity. Put the problems before him and let him solve them himself. Let him know nothing because you have told him, but because he has learnt it for himself. Let him not be taught science, let him discover it. If ever you substitute authority for reason he will cease to reason; he will be a mere plaything of other people's thoughts.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“She was dull, unattractive, couldn't tell the time, count money or tie her own shoe laces... But I loved her”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“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, The Social Contract

“My illusions about the world caused me to think that in order to benefit by my reading I ought to possess all the knowledge the book presupposed. I was very far indeed from imagining that often the author did not possess it himself, but had extracted it from other books, as and when he needed it. This foolish conviction forced me to stop every moment, and to rush incessantly from one book to another; sometimes before coming to the tenth page of the one I was trying to read I should, by this extravagant method, have had to run through whole libraries. Nevertheless I stuck to it so persistently that I wasted infinite time, and my head became so confused that I could hardly see or take in anything.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions

“An unbroken horse erects his mane, paws the ground and starts back impetuously at the sight of the bridle; while one which is properly trained suffers patiently even whip and spur: so savage man will not bend his neck to the yoke to which civilised man submits without a murmur, but prefers the most turbulent state of liberty to the most peaceful slavery. We cannot therefore, from the servility of nations already enslaved, judge of the natural disposition of mankind for or against slavery; we should go by the prodigious efforts of every free people to save itself from oppression. I know that the former are for ever holding forth in praise of the tranquillity they enjoy in their chains, and that they call a state of wretched servitude a state of peace: miserrimam servitutem pacem appellant. But when I observe the latter sacrificing pleasure, peace, wealth, power and life itself to the preservation of that one treasure, which is so disdained by those who have lost it; when I see free-born animals dash their brains out against the bars of their cage, from an innate impatience of captivity; when I behold numbers of naked savages, that despise European pleasures, braving hunger, fire, the sword and death, to preserve nothing but their independence, I feel that it is not for slaves to argue about liberty.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“There is nothing better than the encouragement of a good friend.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“The extreme inequality of our ways of life, the excess of idleness among some and the excess of toil among others, the ease of stimulating and gratifying our appetites and our senses, the over-elaborate foods of the rich, which inflame and overwhelm them with indigestion, the bad food of the poor, which they often go withotu altogether, so hat they over-eat greedily when they have the opportunity; those late nights, excesses of all kinds, immoderate transports of every passion, fatigue, exhaustion of mind, the innumerable sorrows and anxieties that people in all classes suffer, and by which the human soul is constantly tormented: these are the fatal proofs that most of our ills are of our own making, and that we might have avoided nearly all of them if only we had adhered to the simple, unchanging and solitary way of life that nature ordained for us. ”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

“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, The Social Contract

“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, Reveries of the Solitary Walker

“Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“I say to myself: "Who are you to measure infinite power?”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“It is as if my heart and my brain did not belong to the same person. Feelings come quicker than lightning and fill my soul, but they bring me no illumination; they burn me and dazzle me.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions

“Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“The indolence I love is not that of a lazy fellow who sits with his arms across in total inaction, and thinks no more than he acts, but that of a child which is incessantly in motion doing nothing, and that of a dotard who wanders from his subject. I love to amuse myself with trifles, by beginning a hundred things and never finishing one of them, by going or coming as I take either into my head, by changing my project at every instant, by following a fly through all its windings, in wishing to overturn a rock to see what is under it, by undertaking with ardor the work of ten years, and abandoning it without regret at the end of ten minutes; finally, in musing from morning until night without order or coherence, and in following in everything the caprice of a moment.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions

“Every artists wants to be applauded”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“In any case, frequent punishments are a sign of weakness or slackness in the government. There is no man so bad that he cannot be made good for something. No man should be put to death, even as an example, if he can be left to live without danger to society.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

“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

“What, then, is the government? An intermediary body established between the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual communication, a body charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance of freedom, both civil and political.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

“There is no evildoer who could not be made good for something. ”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract