Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

Happiness: a good bank account, a good cook, and a good digestion.

No true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another.

Take from the philosopher the pleasure of being heard and his desire for knowledge ceases.

Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.

I have always said and felt that true enjoyment can not be described.

Whoever blushes is already guilty; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

Base souls have no faith in great individuals.

Do you not know…that a child badly taught is farther from being wise than one not taught at all?

The freedom of Mankind does not lie in the fact that can do what we want, but that we do not have to do that which we do not want.

Insults are the arguments employed by those who are in the wrong.

Heroes are not known by the loftiness of their carriage; the greatest braggarts are generally the merest cowards.

Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.

Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.

O love, if I regret the age when one savors you, it is not for the hour of pleasure, but for the one that follows it.

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

The English think they are free. They are free only during the election of members of parliament.

Religious persecutors are not believers, they are rascals.

I have resolved on an enterprise that has no precedent and will have no imitator. I want to set before my fellow human beings a man in every way true to nature; and that man will be myself.

The falsification of history has done more to impede human development than any one thing known to mankind.

To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn, and that which he will have the most need to know.

Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil.

Why should we build our happiness on the opinons of others, when we can find it in our own hearts?

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.

Our affections as well as our bodies are in perpetual flux.

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.

A feeble body weakens the mind.

I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.

Take the course opposite to custom and you will almost always do well.

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.

I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.

Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.

I only see clearly what I remember.

All of my misfortunes come from having thought too well of my fellows.

Reason deceives us; conscience, never.

Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to save time, but to squander it.

Remorse sleeps during prosperity but awakes bitter consciousness during adversity.

When something an affliction happens to you, you either let it defeat you, or you defeat it.

Plants are shaped by cultivation and men by education. .. We are born weak, we need strength; we are born totally unprovided, we need aid; we are born stupid, we need judgment. Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given us by education.

You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one.

The money you have gives you freedom; the money you pursue enslaves you.

One can buy anything with money except morality.

I long remained a child, and I am still one in many respects.

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.

God made me and broke the mold.

At sixteen, the adolescent knows about suffering because he himself has suffered, but he barely knows that other beings also suffer.

Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

Force does not constitute right… obedience is due only to legitimate powers.