Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes

209 Sourced Quotes

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
The animals you eat are not those who devour others; you do not eat the carnivorous beasts, you take them as your pattern. You only hunger for the sweet and gentle creatures which harm no one, which follow you, serve you, and are devoured by you as the reward of their service.

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 is no subjection so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
There exists one book, which, to my taste, furnishes the happiest treatise of natural education. What then is this marvelous book? Is it Aristotle? Is it Pliny, is it Buffon? No—it is Robinson Crusoe.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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
One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
As soon as we have contrived to give our pupil an idea of the word "Useful," we have got an additional means of controlling him, for this word makes a great impression on him, provided that its meaning for him is a meaning relative to his own age, and provided he clearly sees its relation to his own well-being. This word makes no impression on your scholars because you have taken no pains to give it a meaning they can understand, and because other people always undertake to supply their needs so that they never require to think for themselves, and do not know what utility is. "What is the use of that?"

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I want you to read the true system of the heart, drafted by a decent man and published under another name. I do not want you to be biased against good and useful books merely because a man unworthy of reading them has the audacity to call himself the Author.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Gluttony is the vice of feeble minds. The gourmand has his brains in his palate, he can do nothing but eat; he is so stupid and incapable that the table is the only place for him, and dishes are the only things he knows anything about. Let us leave him to this business without regret; it is better for him and for us.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
A man should never blush in confessing his errors, for he proves by his avowal that he is wiser to-day than yesterday.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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
For no more by the law of reason than by the law of nature can anything occur without a cause.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is; the people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived, and on such occasions only does it seem to will what is bad.

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
Supreme happiness consists in self-content; that we may gain this self-content, we are placed upon this earth and endowed with freedom.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
A citizen should render to the state all the services he can as soon as the sovereign demands them.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Equality is deemed by many a mere speculative chimera, which can never be reduced to practice. But if the abuse is inevitable, does it follow that we ought not to try at least to mitigate it? It is precisely because the force of things tends always to destroy equality that the force of the legislature must always tend to maintain it.

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
Liberty is not to be found in any form of government; she is in the heart of the free man; he bears her with him everywhere.

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
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
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
The majesty of the Scriptures strikes me with admiration, as the purity of the gospel has its influence on my heart.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Nature wants children to be children before men... Childhood has its own seeing, thinking and feeling.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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
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
And when the relics of humanity left among the Spaniards induced them to forbid their lawyers to set foot in America, what must they have thought of jurisprudence? May it not be said that they thought, by this single expedient, to make reparation for all the outrages they had committed against the unhappy Indians?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
It is the chain of accessory ideas that makes me love botany

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