Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes

People in their natural state are basically good. But this natural innocence,however, is corrupted by the evils of society.

I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.

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

Freedom is the power to choose our own chains

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.

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.

I love idleness. I love to busy myself about trifles, to begin a hundred things and not finish one of them, to come and go as my fancy bids me, to change my plan every moment, to follow a fly in all its circlings, to try and uproot a rock to see what is underneath, eagerly to begin a ten-years' task to give it up after ten minutes: in short, to fritter away the whole day inconsequentially and incoherently, and to follow nothing but the whim of the moment.

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

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

Those people who treat politics and morality separately will never understand either of them.

The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had some one pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: "Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!

I am not made like any of those I have seen. I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different.

Socrates dies with honor, surrounded by his disciples listening to the most tender words -the easiest death that one could wish to die. Jesus dies in pain, dishonor, mockery, the object of universal cursing - the most horrible death that one could fear. At the receipt of the cup of poison, Socrates blesses him who could not give it to him without tears; Jesus, while suffering the sharpest pains, prays for His most bitter enemies. If Socrates lived and died like a philosopher, Jesus lived and died like a god.

No one is happy unless he respects himself.

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

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

Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.

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

Once you teach people to say what they do not understand, it is easy enough to get them to say anything you like.

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

What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?

Conscience is the voice of the soul, the passions are the voice of the body. Is it astonishing that often these two languages contradict each other, and then to which must we listen? Too often reason deceives us; we have only too much acquired the right of refusing to listen to it; but conscience never deceives us; it is the true guide of man; it is to man what instinct is to the body; which follows it, obeys nature, and never is afraid of going astray.

Our greatest misfortunes come to us from ourselves.

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.

Education is either from nature, from man or from things. The developing of our faculties and organs is the education of nature; that of man is the application we learn to make of this very developing; and that of things is the experience we acquire in regard to the different objects by which we are affected. All that we have not at our birth, and that we stand in need of at the years of maturity, is the gift of education.

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

No man has any natural authority over his fellow men.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 passions are the voice of the body.

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.

It is believed that physiognomy is only a simple development of the features already marked out by nature. It is my opinion, however, that in addition to this development, the features come insensibly to be formed and assume their shape from the frequent and habitual expression of certain affections of the soul. These affections are marked on the countenance; nothing is more certain than this; and when they turn into habits, they must leave on it durable impressions.

Social man lives constantly outside himself.

The world is the book of women. Whatever knowledge they may possess is more commonly acquired by observation than by reading.

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.

Ruthless man: you begin by slaying the animal and then you devour it, as if to slay it twice. It is not enough. You turn against the dead flesh, it revolts you, it must be transformed by fire, boiled and roasted, seasoned and disguised with drugs; you must have butchers, cooks, turnspits, men who will rid the murder of its horrors, who will dress the dead bodies so that the taste decieved by these disguises will not reject what is strange to it, and will feast on corpses, the very sight of which would sicken you.

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

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.

The animals you eat are not those who devour others; you do not eat the carnivorous beasts, you take them as your pattern. You only hunger for the sweet and gentle creatures which harm no one, which follow you, serve you, and are devoured by you as the reward of their service.

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

The greatest braggarts are usually the biggest cowards.

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

Nature wants children to be children before men... Childhood has its own seeing, thinking and feeling.

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.

Religious persecutors are not believers, they are rascals.

It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.