Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Life Quotes

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It is in man's heart that the life of nature's spectacle exists; to see it, one must feel it.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
We are born, so to speak, twice over; born into existence, and born into life; born a human being, and born a man.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Every man has a right to risk his own life for the preservation of it.

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
Let us not forget what befits our present state in the pursuit of vain fancies. Mankind has its place in the sequence of things; childhood has its place in the sequence of human life; the man must be treated as a man and the child as a child. Give each his place, and keep him there. Control human passions according to man's nature; that is all we can do for his welfare. The rest depends on external forces, which are beyond our control.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The only moral lesson which is suited for a child — the most important lesson for every time of life — is this: 'Never hurt anybody'.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The sowing of wild oats is necessary in the life of a man. Libertinism is a leaven that ferments sooner or later.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Through the fortunate effect of my frankness, I had the rarest and surest opportunity to know a man well, which is to study him at leisure in his private life and living, so to speak, with himself. For he share himself without reservation and made me feel as much at home in his house as in mine. I had almost no other abode than his own.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Yes, if the life and death of Socrates are those of a wise man, the life and death of Jesus are those of a god.

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
But I am mistaken in speaking of a Christian republic; the terms are mutually exclusive. Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favorable to tyranny that it always profits by such a regime. True Christians are made to be slaves, and they know it and do not much mind; this short life counts for too little in their eyes.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau