Quotes by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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In Genoa, the word, libertas can be read on the front of prisons and on the fetters of galley-slaves. The application of this motto is fine and just.

Teach by doing whenever you can, and only fall back upon words when doing it is out of the question.

It is manifestly contrary to the law of nature, however defined, that a handful of people should gorge themselves with superfluities while the hungry majority goes in need of necessities.

In the North the first words are, Help me; in the South, Love me.

Hatred, as well as love, renders its votaries credulous.

For it is in our nature to endure patiently the decrees of fate, but not the ill-will of others.

It is hard to prevent oneself from believing what one so keenly desires, and who can doubt that the interest we have in admitting or denying the reality of the Judgement to come determines the faith of most men in accordance with their hopes and fears.

I say to myself: Who are you to measure infinite power?

Chemistry... is like the maid occupied with daily civilisation; she is busy with fertilisers, medicines, glass, insecticides ... for she dispenses the recipes.

Even knaves may be made good for something.

Do not base your life on the judgments of others; first, because they are as likely to be mistaken as you are, and further, because you cannot know that they are telling you their true thoughts.

The opportunity of making happy is more scarce than we imagine; the punishment of missing it is, never to meet with it again; and the use we make of it leaves us an eternal sentiment of satisfaction or repentance.

If all were perfect Christians, individuals would do their duty; the people would be obedient to the laws, the magistrates incorrupt, and there would be neither vanity nor luxury in such a state.

If there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof is most complete. And with all that, who is there who believes in vampires?

The English people think they are free; they are greatly deceived; they are free only during the election of members of Parliament.

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.

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.

Whatever may be our natural talents, the art of writing is not acquired all at once.

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

An animal, at the end of a few months, is what it will be all its life; and its species, at the end of a thousand years, is what it was in the first of those thousand years. Why is man alone subject to becoming an imbecile?

Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.

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.

Among the many short cuts to science, we badly need someone to teach us the art of learning with difficulty.

We are reduced to asking others what we are. We never dare to ask ourselves.

Taste is, so to speak, the microscope of the judgment.

In all the ills that befall us, we are more concerned by the intention than the result. A tile that falls off a roof may injure us more seriously, but it will not wound us so deeply as a stone thrown deliberately by a malevolent hand. The blow may miss, but the intention always strikes home.

Trust your heart rather than your head.

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.

The political body, therefore, is also a moral being which has a will; and this general will, which tends always to the conservation and well-being of the whole and of each part of it ... is, for all members of the state ... the rule of what is just or unjust.

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

There are always four sides to a story: your side, their side, the truth and what really happened.

The ever-recurring law of necessity soon teaches a man to do what he does not like, so as to avert evils which he would dislike still more... this foresight, well or ill used, is the source of all the wisdom or the wretchedness of mankind.

I have suffered too much in this world not to hope for another.

But in some great souls, who consider themselves as citizens of the world, and forcing the imaginary barriers that separate people from people.

Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls.

All through life a man has need of a counsellor and guide.

The strength of the people is effective only if it is concentrated; it evaporates and is lost when it is dispersed, just as gunpowder scattered on the ground ignites only grain by grain.

Many men, seemingly impelled by fortune, hasten forward to meet misfortune half way.

The infant, on opening his eyes, ought to see his country, and to the hour of his death never lose sight of it.

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

The mechanism she employs is much more powerful than ours, for all her levers move the human heart.

Men will argue more philosophically about the human heart; but women will read the heart of man better than they.

If he who has control of men ought not to control the laws, then he who controls the laws ought not control men: otherwise his laws would minister to his passions.

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

There is not a single ill-doer who could not be turned to some good.

He who pretends to look on death without fear lies. All men are afraid of dying, this is the great law of sentient beings, without which the entire human species would soon be destroyed.

To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.

I feel an indescribable ecstasy and delirium in melting, as it were, into the system of being, in identifying myself with the whole of nature.

A paralyzed man who wants to walk OR an agile man who does not want to walk will both remain neutral in nature.

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

Presence of mind, penetration, fine observation, are the sciences of women; ability to avail themselves of these is their talent.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

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.

Women speak at an earlier age, more easily, and more agreeably than men; they are accused also of speaking more; this is as it should be, and I willingly change the reproach into a eulogy.

The tone of good conversation is brilliant and natural; it is neither tedious nor frivolous; it is instructive without pedantry, gay without tumultuousness, polished without affectation, gallant without insipidity, waggish without equivocation.

The truth brings no man a fortune.

To renounce freedom is to renounce one's humanity, one's rights as a man and equally one's duties.

We have to have powder for our wigs; that is why so many poor people have no bread.

Christ preaches only servitude and dependence... True Christians are made to be slaves.

The empire of woman is an empire of softness, of address, of complacency. Her commands are caresses, her menaces are tears.

You are worried about seeing him spend his early years in doing nothing. What! Is it nothing to be happy? Nothing to skip, play and run around all day long? Never in his life will he be so busy again.

The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty.

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

To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. For he who renounces everything no indemnity is possible. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man's nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts.

As soon as any man says of the affairs of the State What does it matter to me? the State may be given up for lost.

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

Every man having been born free and master of himself, no one else may under any pretext whatever subject him without his consent. To assert that the son of a slave is born a slave is to assert that he is not born a man.

Good laws lead to the making of better ones; bad ones bring about worse.

In the strict sense of the term, a true democracy has never existed, and never will exist.

In respect of riches, no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself.

Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping from them.

War then, is a relation -- not between man and man but between state and state and individuals are enemies only accidentally not as men, nor even as citizens but as soldiers not as members of their country, but as its defenders.

A born king is a very rare being.

In a well governed state, there are few punishments, not because there are many pardons, but because criminals are rare; it is when a state is in decay that the multitude of crimes is a gaurantee of impunity.

It is easier to conquer than to administer. With enough leverage, a finger could overturn the world; but to support the world, one must have the shoulders of Hercules.

There is peace in dungeons, but is that enough to make dungeons desirable?

In truth, laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to those who have nothing; from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all possess something and none has too much.

How many famous and high-spirited heroes have lived a day too long?

The taste for splendor is hardly ever combined in the same souls with the taste for the honorable.

The social pact, far from destroying natural equality, substitutes, on the contrary, a moral and lawful equality for whatever physical inequality that nature may have imposed on mankind; so that however unequal in strength and intelligence, men become equal by covenant and by right.

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.

If there were a people consisting of gods, they would be governed democratically. So perfect a government is not suitable to men.

I think we cannot too strongly attack superstition, which is the disturber of society; nor too highly respect genuine religion, which is the support of it.

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

A blue-stocking is the scourge of her husband, children, friends, servants, and every one.

Fr., Une femme bel-esprit est le fleau de son mari, de ses enfants, de ses amis, de ses valets, et tout le monde.

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.

Peter had a genius for imitation; but he lacked true genius, which is creative and makes all from nothing.

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.