Jean-Jacques Rousseau quotes:

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most nations, as well as people are impossible only in their youth; they become incorrigible as they grow older.

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

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

However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.

The body politic, as well as the human body, begins to die as soon as it is born, and carries itself the causes of its destruction.

Base souls have no faith in great individuals.

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

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

Being wealthy isn't just a question of having lots of money. It's a question of what we want. Wealth isn't an absolute, it's relative to desire. Every time we seek something that we can't afford, we can be counted as poor, how much money we may actually have.

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

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.

Abstaining so as really to enjoy, is the epicurism, the very perfection, of reason.

What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?

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.

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

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

To this motive which encourages me is added another which made up my mind: after I have upheld, according to my natural intelligence, the side of truth, no matter what success I have, there is a prize which I cannot fail to win. I will find it in the depths of my heart.

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

But if the abberations of foolish youth made me forget suc wise lessons for a time,I have the happiness to sense at last that whatever the inclination one may have toward vice,it is difficult for an education in which the heart is involved to remain forever lost.

Innocence is ashamed of nothing.

My bad head cannot adjust itself to the way things are.... If I want to depict spring, it has to be in wintertime; if I want to describe a beautiful landscape, I must be enclosed within walls; and I have said a hundred times that if I were put in the Bastille, there I would paint a picture of liberty.

Patience patience quotes is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.

Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.

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

The greatest braggarts are usually the biggest cowards.

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.

I hate books, for they only teach people to talk about what they don't understand.

Childhood is the sleep of reason.

When a man dies he clutches in his hands only that which he has given away during his lifetime.

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

Conscience is the voice of the soul; the passions of the body.

Inopportune consolations increase a deep sorrow.

Everything degenerates in the hands of man.

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..

Behold the works of our philosophers; with all their pompous diction, how mean and contemptible they are by comparison with the Scriptures! Is it possible that a book at once so simple and sublime should be merely the work of man?

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

People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little. It is plain that an ignorant person thinks everything he does know important, and he tells it to everybody. But a well-educated man is not so ready to display his learning; he would have too much to say, and he sees that there is much more to be said, so he holds his peace.

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

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

That which renders life burdensome to us generally arises from the abuse of it.

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.

Too much apparatus, designed to guide us in experiments and to supplement the exactness of our senses, makes us neglect to use those senses...The more ingenious our apparatus, the coarser and more unskillful are our senses. We surround ourselves with tools and fail to use those which nature has provided every one of us.

I think it impossible that the great monarchies of Europe can last much longer.

[When anything happens, we interpret it as good or bad, but...] We do not know what is really good or bad fortune. [Only the future can decide. For example, what appears to be bad today may in fact lead us to a greater good tomorrow and by the very act of thinking and planning in that positive way, we can help make that good future come true.]

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.

Money is the seed of money, and the first guinea is sometimes more difficult to acquire than the second million.

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 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 want of occupation is no less the plague of society than of solitude.

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

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.

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.

And when the relics of humanity left among the Spaniards induced them to forbid their lawyers to set foot in America, what must they have thought of jurisprudence? May it not be said that they thought, by this single expedient, to make reparation for all the outrages they had committed against the unhappy Indians?

Even knaves may be made good for something.

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

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

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

The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during election of members of parliament; as soon as the members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing. In the brief moment of its freedom, the English people makes such a use of that freedom that it deserves to lose it.

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

Days of absence, sad and dreary, Clothed in sorrow's dark array, - Days of absence, I am weary; She I love is far away. Poetic Verse by

Do not judge, and you will never be mistaken.

God made me and broke the mold.

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.

True genius is creative and makes all from nothing.

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.

Remorse sleeps during prosperity but awakes bitter consciousness during adversity.

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

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

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

Every state funeral that shines is on its decline

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

A taste for ostentation is rarely associated in the same souls with a taste for honesty

I hear from afar the shouts of that false wisdom which is ever dragging us onwards, counting the present as nothing, and pursuing without pause a future which flies as we pursue, that false wisdom which removes us from our place and never brings us to any other.

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

The real world has its limits; the imaginary world is infinite. Unable to enlarge the one, let us restrict the other, for it is from the difference between the two alone that are born all the pains which make us truly unhappy.

More than half of my life is past; I have left only the time I need for turning the rest of it to account and for effacing my errors by my virtues.

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

The first sentiment of man was that of his existence, his first care that of preserving it.

Ah,' thought the king sadly, shrugging his shoulders, "I see clearly that if one has a crazy wife, one cannot avoid being a fool.'("Queen Fantasque")

I had brought from Paris the national prejudice against Italian music; but I had also received from nature that acute sensibility against which prejudices are powerless. I soon contracted the passion it inspires in all those born to understand it.

Now it is easy to perceive that the moral part of love is a factitious sentiment, engendered by society, and cried up by the women with great care and address in order to establish their empire, and secure command to that sex which ought to obey.

Truth is an homage that the good man pays to his own dignity.

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

The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, 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.

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

The truth brings no man a fortune.

I perceive God everywhere in His works. I sense Him in me; I see Him all around me.

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

Every person has a right to risk their own life for the preservation of it.

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

...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~?

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

The truths of the Scriptures are so marked and inimitable, that the inventor would be more of a miraculous character than the hero.

The majesty of the Scriptures strikes me with admiration, as the purity of the gospel has its influence on my heart.

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

As evening approached, I came down from the heights of the island, and I liked then to go and sit on the shingle in some secluded spot by the lake; there the noise of the waves and the movement of the water, taking hold of my senses and driving all other agitation from my soul, would plunge me into delicious reverie in which night often stole upon me unawares.

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

Singing and dancing alone will not advance one in the world. [Fr., Qui bien chante et bien danse fait un metier qui peu avance.]

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.

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

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

At first we will only skim the surface of the earth like young starlings, but soon, emboldened by practice and experience, we will spring into the air with the impetuousness of the eagle, diverting ourselves by watching the childish behavior of the little men or awling miserably around on the earth below us.

Religious persecutors are not believers, they are rascals.

What good would it be to possess the whole universe if one were its only survivor?

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.

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.