Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Man Quotes

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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
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
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
To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Man's education begins at birth; before he can speak or hear, he is already learning.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.

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

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the author of things, everything degenerates in the hands of man.

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
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
War is then not a relationship between one man and another, but a relationship between one State and another, in which individuals are enemies only by accident, not as men, nor even as citizens, but as soldiers; not as members of the fatherland, but as its defenders. Finally, any State can only have other States, and not men, as enemies, inasmuch as it is impossible to fix a true relation between things of different natures.

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
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
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
Provided a man is not mad, he can be cured of every folly but vanity; there is no cure for this but experience, if indeed there is any cure for it at all.

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
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
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 thirst after happiness is never extinguished in the heart of man.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man's estate, is the gift of education.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Everything is good when it leaves the hands of the Creator; everything degenerates in the hands of man.

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
I have never believed that man's freedom consisted in doing what he wants, but rather in never doing what he does not want to do.

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

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

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Every age has its different inclinations, but man is always the same. At ten, he is led by sweetmeats, at twenty by a mistress, at thirty by pleasure, at forty by ambition, at fifty by avarice.

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