Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes

208 Sourced Quotes

Usurpers always bring about or select troublous times to get passed, under cover of the public terror, destructive laws, which the people would never adopt in cold blood. The moment chosen is one of the surest means of distinguishing the work of the legislator from that of the tyrant.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
How sweet it would be to live in society if the countenance always reflected the disposition, if decency were virtue, and if our maxims were our rules of action.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
In Genoa, the word, libertas can be read on the front of prisons and on the fetters of galley-slaves. The application of this motto is fine and just.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Self-love makes more libertines than love.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Sophie is not beautiful, but in her company men forget beautiful women, and beautiful women are dissatisfied with themselves.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
That man is truly free who desires what he is able to perform, and does what he desires.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The mechanism she employs is much more powerful than ours, for all her levers move the human heart.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Luxury either comes of riches or makes them necessary; it corrupts at once rich and poor, the rich by possession and the poor by covetousness.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
It is not what is criminal that it is the hardest to reveal, but what is laughable or shameful.

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

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
If happiness could be prolonged from love into marriage, we should have paradise on earth.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Who of us has not regretted that age when laughter was ever on the lips!

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
A man speaks of what he knows, a woman of what pleases her: the one requires knowledge, the other taste.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Let the trumpet of the day of judgment sound when it will, I shall appear with this book in my hand before the Sovereign Judge, and cry with a loud voice, This is my work, there were my thoughts, and thus was I. I have freely told both the good and the bad, have hid nothing wicked, added nothing good.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Teach by doing whenever you can, and only fall back upon words when doing it is out of the question.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Your first duty is to be humane. Love childhood. Look with friendly eyes on its games, its pleasures, its amiable dispositions. Which of you does not sometimes look back regretfully on the age when laughter was ever on the lips and the heart free of care? Why steal from the little innocents the enjoyment of a time that passes all too quickly?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Much more naturally than you do: because flight is a much more natural consequence of fear than of hate. He doesn't flee men because he hates them, but because he is afraid of them. He doesn't flee them in order to harm them, but to try o escape the harm they wish to do to him. They, on the contrary, don't seek him through friendship, but through hate. They seek him and he flees from them just as in the wilderness of Africa, where there are few men and many tigers, the men flee the tigers the men flee the tigers and the tigers seek the men.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Remorse sleeps during a prosperous period but wakes up in adversity.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The thirst after happiness is never extinguished in the heart of man.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
If, by chance, someone among those men of extraordinary talent is found who has firmness of soul and who refuses to yield to the genius of his age and to debase himself with childish works, woe unto him! He will die in poverty and oblivion.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Teach him to live rather than to avoid death: life is not breath, but action, the use of our senses, our mind, our faculties, every part of ourselves which makes us conscious of our being. Life consists less in length of days than in the keen sense of living. A man maybe buried at a hundred and may never have lived at all. He would have fared better had he died young.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
J. J. did not always flee from men, but he has always loved solitude. He enjoyed himself with the friends he velieved he had, but he enjoyed himself still more alone. He valued their society, but he sometimes needed to withdraw, and he would perhaps have preferred to live always alone than always with them.

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
Conscience is the voice of the soul; the passions are the voice of the body.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau