Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer. His political philosophy influenced the progress of the Age of Enlightenment throughout Europe, as well as aspects of the French Revolution and the development of modern political, economic, and educational thought.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes
Love, known to the person by whom it is inspired, becomes more bearable.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
We must powder our wigs; that is why so many poor people have no bread.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
It is as if my heart and my brain did not belong to the same person. Feelings come quicker than lightning and fill my soul, but they bring me no illumination; they burn me and dazzle me.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
There is nothing better than the encouragement of a good friend.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
In any case, frequent punishments are a sign of weakness or slackness in the government. There is no man so bad that he cannot be made good for something. No man should be put to death, even as an example, if he can be left to live without danger to society.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
As soon as any man says of the affairs of the State “What does it matter to me?” the State may be given up for lost.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The truth brings no man a fortune.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Trust your heart rather than your head.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
In truth, laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to those who have nothing; from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all possess something and none has too much.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Or, rather, let us be more simple and less vain.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Childhood has its own way of seeing, thinking, and feeling, and nothing is more foolish than to try to substitute ours for theirs.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
[T]he mere impulse of appetite is slavery, while obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Among the many short cuts to science, we badly need someone to teach us the art of learning with difficulty.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau