Words matter. These are the best Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
Gratitude is a duty which ought to be paid, but which none have a right to expect.
No man has any natural authority over his fellow men.
Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.
Whoever blushes is already guilty; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.
However great a man’s natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.
Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone.
I long remained a child, and I am still one in many respects.
How many famous and high-spirited heroes have lived a day too long?
The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.
We should not teach children the sciences; but give them a taste for them.
It is unnatural for a majority to rule, for a majority can seldom be organized and united for specific action, and a minority can.
Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it.
What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?
People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.
Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.
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.
Religious persecutors are not believers, they are rascals.
O love, if I regret the age when one savors you, it is not for the hour of pleasure, but for the one that follows it.
Childhood is the sleep of reason.
I may be no better, but at least I am different.
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.
Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil.
It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.
Every man has a right to risk his own life for the preservation of it.
I only see clearly what I remember.
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.
The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it.
When something an affliction happens to you, you either let it defeat you, or you defeat it.
Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.
Take the course opposite to custom and you will almost always do well.
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.
Our affections as well as our bodies are in perpetual flux.
