358 Quotes by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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We do not know what is really good or bad fortune.

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

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

The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it.

Remorse sleeps during prosperity but awakes bitter consciousness during adversity.

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

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

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

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

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

Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.

I may be no better, but at least I am different.

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.

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

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

Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.

We should not teach children the sciences; but give them a taste for them.

Gratitude is a duty which ought to be paid, but which none have a right to expect.

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

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

No man has any natural authority over his fellow men.

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

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

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.

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

The person who has lived the most is not the one with the most years but the one with the richest experiences.

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.

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.

It is unnatural for a majority to rule, for a majority can seldom be organized and united for specific action, and a minority can.

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

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

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

An intelligent being, is the active principle of all things. One must have renounced all common sense to doubt it, and it is a waste of time to try to prove such self evident truth.

Liberty is like rich food and strong wine: the strong natures accustomed to them thrive and grow even stronger on them; but they deplete, inebriate and destroy the weak.

It is not the criminal things that are hardest to confess, but the ridiculous and the shameful.

The happiest is the person who suffers the least pain; the most miserable who enjoys the least pleasure.

L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers.

Fame is but the breath of people, and that often unwholesome.

Childhood is the sleep of reason.

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

We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.

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

The English are predisposed to pride, the French to vanity.

Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone.

Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is.

The first step towards vice is to shroud innocent actions in mystery, and whoever likes to conceal something sooner or later has reason to conceal it.

Or, rather, let us be more simple and less vain.

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

I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.

Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.

To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness.

People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.

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

A feeble body weakens the mind.

Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.