Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Man Quotes

50 Sourced Quotes

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

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Let's not be dazzled by the sententious glitter with which error and lying often cover themselves. Society is not created by the crowd, and bodies come together in vain when hearts reject each other. The truly sociable man is more difficult in his relationships than others; those which consist only in false appearances cannot suit him. He prefers to live far from wicked men without thinking about them, than to see them and hate them. He prefers to flee his enemy rather than seek him out to harm him. A person who knows no other society than that of the heart will not seek his society in you circles. That is How J. J. must have thought and behaved before the conspiracy of which he is the object.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
We cannot teach children the danger of telling lies to men without realising, on the man's part, the danger of telling lies to children. A single untruth on the part of the master will destroy the results of his 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
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
The origin of our passions, the root and spring of all the rest, the only one which is born with man, which never leaves him as long as he lives, is self-love; this passion is primitive, instinctive, it precedes all the rest, which are in a sense only modifications of it. In this sense, if you like, they are all natural. But most of these modifications are the result of external influences, without which they would never occur, and such modifications, far from being advantageous to us, are harmful. They change the original purpose and work against its end; then it is that man finds himself outside nature and at strife with himself.

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
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
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
The moment past is no longer: the future may never be: the present is all of which man is the master.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
With children use force; with men reason; such is the natural order of things. The wise man requires no law.

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
Where is the man who owes nothing to the land in which he lives? Whatever that land may be, he owes to it the most precious thing possessed by man, the morality of his actions and the love of virtue.

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
A man says what he knows, a woman says what will please.

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

Jean-Jacques Rousseau