Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes

208 Sourced Quotes

Men, be kind to your fellow-men; this is your first duty, kind to every age and station, kind to all that is not foreign to humanity. What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?

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

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

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil.... Blushes are the sign of guilt; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Gratitude is a duty which ought to be paid, but which none have a right to expect.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The body politic, like the human body, begins to die from its birth, and bears in itself the causes of its destruction.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
So, decide to raise them like men. The men will gladly consent to it! The more women want to resemble them, the less women will govern them, and then men will truly be the masters.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Good laws lead to the making of better ones; bad ones bring about worse.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
To study men, we must look close by; to study man, we must learn to look afar; if we are to discover essential characteristics, we must first observe differences.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The taste for splendor is hardly ever combined in the same souls with the taste for the honorable.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms his strength into right, and obedience into duty.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
If there were a people of gods, they would govern themselves democratically: so perfect a government is not suitable to men.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The first man to fence in a piece of land, saying This is mine, and who found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
From the first moment of life, men ought to begin learning to deserve to live; and, as at the instant of birth we partake of the rights of citizenship, that instant ought to be the beginning of the exercise of our duty.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
For it is in our nature to endure patiently the decrees of fate, but not the ill-will of others.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
At sixteen, the adolescent knows about suffering because he himself has suffered, but he barely knows that other beings also suffer.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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
I only know that truth is in the things, and not in my mind which judges of them, and that the less there is of mine in the judgment I form, the surer I am of attaining the truth.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
General abstract truth is the most precious of all blessings; without it, man is blind; it is the eye of reason.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Should I live for centuries, the sweet period of my youth would not be reborn, nor effaced from my memory.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Sovereigns always see with pleasure a taste for the arts of amusement and superfluity, which do not result in the exportation of bullion, increase among their subjects. They very well know that, besides nourishing that littleness of mind which is proper to slavery, the increase of artificial wants only binds so many more chains upon the people.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
God is intelligent; but in what manner? Man is intelligent by the act of reasoning, but the supreme intelligence lies under no necessity to reason. He requires neither premise nor consequences; nor even the simple form of a proposition. His knowledge is purely intuitive. He beholds equally what is and what will be. All truths are to Him as one idea, as all places are but one point, and all times one moment.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I loved too sincerely, too completely, I venture to say, to be able to be happy easily.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
One must choose between making a man or a citizen, for one cannot make both at the same time.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I have entered on an enterprise which is without precedent, and will have no imitator. I propose to show my fellows a man as nature made him, and this man shall be myself.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau