Jean-Jacques Rousseau quotes - page 2

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)
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
It is unnatural for a majority to rule, for a majority can seldom be organized and united for specific action, and a minority can.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Truth is no road to fortune.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
What good would it be to possess the whole universe if one were its only survivor?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I remembered the way out suggested by a great princess when told that the peasants had no bread: "Well, let them eat cake".
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Hatred, as well as love, renders its votaries credulous.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I feel an indescribable ecstasy and delirium in melting, as it were, into the system of beings, in identifying myself with the whole of nature.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The body politic, like the human body, begins to die from its birth, and bears in itself the causes of its destruction. (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)
Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Temperance and labor are the two best physicians of man labor sharpens the appetite, and temperance prevents from indulging to excess.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I have never thought, for my part, that man's freedom consists in his being able to do whatever he wills, but that he should not, by any human power, be forced to do what is against his will.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Let's go dance under the elms: Step lively, young lassies. Let's go dance under the elms: Gallants, take up your pipes.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Once you teach people to say what they do not understand, it is easy enough to get them to say anything you like.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Maker of the world, but degenerates once it gets into the hands of man.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I only see clearly what I remember.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist. (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)
The English are predisposed to pride, the French to vanity.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn, and that which he will have the most need to know.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Take the course opposite to custom and you will almost always do well.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau