The Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes

“A father has done but a third of his task when he begets children and provides a living for them. He owes men to humanity, citizens to the state. A man who can pay this threefold debt and neglect to do so is guilty, more guilty, perhaps, if he pays it in part than when he neglects it entirely. He has no right to be a father if he cannot fulfil a father's duties. Poverty, pressure of business, mistaken social prejudices, none of these can excuse a man from his duty, which is to support and educate his own children.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, Confessions, Emile, and Other Essays

“To be something, to be himself, and always at one with himself, a man must act as he speaks, must know what course he ought to take, and must follow that course with vigour and persistence.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, Confessions, Emile, and Other Essays

“I cannot repeat too often that to control the child one must often control oneself.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, Confessions, Emile, and Other Essays

“The wisest writers devote themselves to what a man ought to know, without asking what a child is capable of learning. They are always looking for the man in the child, without considering what he is before he becomes a man.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, Confessions, Emile, and Other Essays

“Teach by doing whenever you can, and only fall back upon words when doing is out of the question.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, Confessions, Emile, and Other Essays

“I do not like verbal explanations. Young people pay little heed to them, nor do they remember them. Things! Things! I cannot repeat it too often. We lay too much stress upon words; we teachers babble, and our scholars follow our example.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, Confessions, Emile, and Other Essays

“If instead of making a child stick to his books I employ him in a workshop, his hands work for the development of his mind. While he fancies himself a workman he is becoming a philosopher.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, Confessions, Emile, and Other Essays

“Again I must enter into minute and detailed explanations. I hear my readers murmur, but I am prepared to meet their disapproval; I will not sacrifice the most important part of this book to your impatience. You may think me as long-winded as you please; I have my own opinion as to your complaints.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, Confessions, Emile, and Other Essays

“Since everything that comes into the human mind enters through the gates of sense, man's first reason is a reason of sense-experience. It is this that serves as a foundation for the reason of the intelligence; our first teachers in natural philosophy are our feet, hands, and eyes. To substitute books for them does not teach us to reason, it teaches us to use the reason of others rather than our own; it teaches us to believe much and know little.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, Confessions, Emile, and Other Essays

“Young teacher, I am setting before you a difficult task, the art of controlling without precepts, and doing everything without doing anything at all. This art is, I confess, beyond your years, it is not calculated to display your talents nor to make your value known to your scholar's parents; but it is the only road to success.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, Confessions, Emile, and Other Essays

“I would rather he never learnt to read at all, than that this art should be acquired at the price of all that makes reading useful. What is the use of reading to him if he always hates it?”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, Confessions, Emile, and Other Essays

“When I thus get rid of children's lessons, I get rid of the chief cause of their sorrows, namely their books. Reading is the curse of childhood, yet it is almost the only occupation you can find for children. Emile, at twelve years old, will hardly know what a book is. "But," you say, "he must, at least, know how to read.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, Confessions, Emile, and Other Essays

“To select these objects, to take care to present him constantly with those he may know, to conceal from him those he ought not to know, this is the real way of training his early memory; and in this way you must try to provide him with a storehouse of knowledge which will serve for his education in youth and his conduct throughout life. True, this method does not produce infant prodigies, nor will it reflect glory upon their tutors and governesses, but it produces men, strong, right-thinking men, vigorous both in mind and body, men who do not win admiration as children, but honour as men.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, Confessions, Emile, and Other Essays

“Without the study of books, such a memory as the child may possess is not left idle; everything he sees and hears makes an impression on him, he keeps a record of men's sayings and doings, and his whole environment is the book from which he unconsciously enriches his memory, till his judgment is able to profit by it.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, Confessions, Emile, and Other Essays

“Plato, in his Republic, which is considered so stern, teaches the children only through festivals, games, songs, and amusements. It seems as if he had accomplished his purpose when he had taught them to be happy; and Seneca, speaking of the Roman lads in olden days, says, "They were always on their feet, they were never taught anything which kept them sitting." Were they any the worse for it in manhood? Do not be afraid, therefore, of this so-called idleness. What would you think of a man who refused to sleep lest he should waste part of his life? You would say, "He is mad; he is not enjoying his life, he is robbing himself of part of it; to avoid sleep he is hastening his death." Remember that these two cases are alike, and that childhood is the sleep of reason.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, Confessions, Emile, and Other Essays

“You fail to perceive that it is a greater waste of time to use it ill than to do nothing, and that a child ill taught is further from virtue than a child who has learnt nothing at all. You are afraid to see him spending his early years doing nothing. What! is it nothing to be happy, nothing to run and jump all day? He will never be so busy again all his life long.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, Confessions, Emile, and Other Essays

“If you want to say something clever, you have only to talk long enough.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, Confessions, Emile, and Other Essays

“There is quite another class of exceptions: those so gifted by nature that they rise above the level of their age. As there are men who never get beyond infancy, so there are others who are never, so to speak, children, they are men almost from birth. The”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, Confessions, Emile, and Other Essays

“Children's lies are therefore entirely the work of their teachers, and to teach them to speak the truth is nothing less than to teach them the art of lying. In your zeal to rule, control, and teach them, you never find sufficient means at your disposal. You wish to gain fresh influence over their minds by baseless maxims, by unreasonable precepts; and you would rather they knew their lessons and told lies, than leave them ignorant and truthful.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, Confessions, Emile, and Other Essays

“Young teacher, pray consider this example, and remember that your lessons should always be in deeds rather than words, for children soon forget what they say or what is said to them, but not what they have done nor what has been done to them.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, Confessions, Emile, and Other Essays

“People seek a tutor who has already educated one pupil. This is too much; one man can only educate one pupil; if two were essential to success, what right would he have to undertake the first?”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, Confessions, Emile, and Other Essays

“The new-born infant cries, his early days are spent in crying. He is alternately petted and shaken by way of soothing him; sometimes he is threatened, sometimes beaten, to keep him quiet. We do what he wants or we make him do what we want, we submit to his whims or subject him to our own. There is no middle course; he must rule or obey. Thus his earliest ideas are those of the tyrant or the slave. He commands before he can speak, he obeys before he can act, and sometimes he is punished for faults before he is aware of them, or rather before they are committed. Thus early are the seeds of evil passions sown in his young heart. At a later day these are attributed to nature, and when we have taken pains to make him bad we lament his badness. In this way the child passes six or seven years in the hands of women, the victim of his own caprices or theirs, and after they have taught him all sorts of things, when they have burdened his memory with words he cannot understand, or things which are of no use to him, when nature has been stifled by the passions they have implanted in him, this sham article is sent to a tutor. The tutor completes the development of the germs of artificiality which he finds already well grown, he teaches him everything except self-knowledge and self-control, the arts of life and happiness. When at length this infant slave and tyrant, crammed with knowledge but empty of sense, feeble alike in mind and body, is flung upon the world, and his helplessness, his pride, and his other vices are displayed, we begin to lament the wretchedness and perversity of mankind. We are wrong; this is the creature of our fantasy; the natural man is cast in another mould.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, Confessions, Emile, and Other Essays

“He was freer and less constrained in the womb; he has gained nothing by birth.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, Confessions, Emile, and Other Essays

“Civilised man is born and dies a slave. The infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the corpse is nailed down in his coffin. All his life long man is imprisoned by our institutions.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, Confessions, Emile, and Other Essays

“He who would preserve the supremacy of natural feelings in social life knows not what he asks. Ever at war with himself, hesitating between his wishes and his duties, he will be neither a man nor a citizen. He will be of no use to himself nor to others. He will be a man of our day, a Frenchman, an Englishman, one of the great middle class. To be something, to be himself, and always at one with himself, a man must act as he speaks, must know what course he ought to take, and must follow that course with vigour and persistence. When I meet this miracle it will be time enough to decide whether he is a man or a citizen, or how he contrives to be both. Two conflicting types of educational systems spring from these conflicting aims. One is public and common to many, the other private and domestic.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, Confessions, Emile, and Other Essays

“We are born sensitive and from our birth onwards we are affected in various ways by our environment. As soon as we become conscious of our sensations we tend to seek or shun the things that cause them, at first because they are pleasant or unpleasant, then because they suit us or not, and at last because of judgments formed by means of the ideas of happiness and goodness which reason gives us. These tendencies gain strength and permanence with the growth of reason, but hindered by our habits they are more or less warped by our prejudices. Before this change they are what I call Nature within us.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, Confessions, Emile, and Other Essays