Jean Jacques Rousseau (Philosopher)

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society...

— Jean Jacques Rousseau people

You are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau art

Le premier qui, ayant enclos un terrain, s'avisa de dire: Ceci est

— Jean Jacques Rousseau ya

Never exceed your rights, and they will soon become unlimited.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau you

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

— Jean Jacques Rousseau time

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

— Jean Jacques Rousseau

I know that [civilized men] do nothing but boast incessantly of the peace and repose they enjoy in their chains.... But when I see [barbarous man] sacrifice pleasures, repose, wealth, power, and life itself for the preservation of this sole good which is so disdained by those who have lost it; when I see animals born free and despising captivity break their heads against the bars of their prison; when I see multitudes of entirely naked savages scorn European voluptuousness and endure hunger, fire, the sword, and death to preserve only their independence, I feel it does not behoove slaves to reason about freedom.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau life

Du Contrat Social as translated by G.D.H. Cole (1913)

— Jean Jacques Rousseau

Tranquillity is found also in dungeons; but is that enough to make them desirable places to live in?

— Jean Jacques Rousseau live

— Jean Jacques Rousseau words

L'homme est n

— Jean Jacques Rousseau

The strongest is never strong enough always to be master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau strength

The right of conquest has no foundation other than the right of the strongest. If war does not give the conqueror the right to massacre the conquered peoples, the right to enslave them cannot be based upon a right which does not exist. No one has a right to kill an enemy except when he cannot make him a slave, and the right to enslave him cannot therefore be derived from the right to kill him. It is accordingly an unfair exchange to make him buy at the price of his liberty his life, over which the victor holds no right. Is it not clear that there is a vicious circle in founding the right of life and death on the right of slavery, and the right of slavery on the right of life and death?

— Jean Jacques Rousseau life

From whatever aspect we regard the question, the right of slavery is null and void, not only as being illegitimate, but also because it is absurd and meaningless. The words slave and right contradict each other, and are mutually exclusive. It will always be equally foolish for a man to say to a man or to a people: “I make with you a convention wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; I shall keep it as long as I like, and you will keep it as long as I like.”

— Jean Jacques Rousseau people

The mere impulse of appetite is slavery, while obedience to the law we prescribe to ourselves is liberty.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau liberty

We may add that frequent punishments are always a sign of weakness or remissness on the part of the government.In a well-governed state, there are few punishments, not because there are many pardons, but because criminals are rare; it is when a state is in decay that the multitudes of crimes is a guarantee of impunity.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau art

In the strict sense of the term, a true democracy has never existed, and never will exist. It is against natural order that the great number should govern and that the few should be governed.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau democracy

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 man

The very right to vote imposes on me the duty to instruct myself in public affair, however little influence my voice may have in them.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau self

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 self

Good laws lead to the making of better ones; bad ones bring about worse.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau law

At Genoa, the word Liberty may be read over the front of the prisons and on the chains of the galley-slaves. This application of the device is good and just. It is indeed only malefactors of all estates who prevent the citizen from being free. In the country in which all such men were in the galleys, the most perfect liberty would be enjoyed.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau joy

If there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof is most complete. And with all that, who is there who believes in vampires?

— Jean Jacques Rousseau people

Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau think

The happiest is he who suffers least; the most miserable is he who enjoys least.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau joy

Tout est bien sortant des mains de l'Auteur des choses, tout d

— Jean Jacques Rousseau

I shall always maintain that whoso says in his heart, "There is no God," while takes the name of God upon his lips, is either a liar or a madman.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau art

Les villes sont le gouffre de l'esp

— Jean Jacques Rousseau

Une des preuves que le go

— Jean Jacques Rousseau

La gourmandise est le vice des c

— Jean Jacques Rousseau man

Le plus heureux est celui qui souffre le moins de peines; le plus mis

— Jean Jacques Rousseau

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau books

Jamais la nature ne nous trompe; c’est toujours nous qui nous trompons.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau nature

Puisqu’il nous faut absolument des livres, il en existe un qui fournit,

— Jean Jacques Rousseau men

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

— Jean Jacques Rousseau science

Our passions are the chief means of self-preservation; to try to destroy them is therefore as absurd as it is useless; this would be to overcome nature, to reshape God's handiwork. If God bade man annihilate the passions he has given him, God would bid him be and not be; He would contradict himself. He has never given such a foolish commandment, there is nothing like it written on the heart of man, and what God will have a man do, He does not leave to the words of another man. He speaks Himself; His words are written in the secret heart.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau art

I consider those who would prevent the birth of the passions almost as foolish as those who would destroy them, and those who think this has been my object hitherto are greatly mistaken. But should we reason rightly, if from the fact that passions are natural to man, we inferred that all the passions we feel in ourselves and behold in others are natural? Their source, indeed, is natural; but they have been swollen by a thousand other streams; they are a great river which is constantly growing, one in which we can scarcely find a single drop of the original stream. Our natural passions are few in number; they are the means to freedom, they tend to self-preservation. All those which enslave and destroy us have another source; nature does not bestow them on us; we seize on them in her despite.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau freedom

The origin of our passions, the root and spring of all the rest, the only one which is born with man, which never leaves him as long as he lives, is self-love; this passion is primitive, instinctive, it precedes all the rest, which are in a sense only modifications of it. In this sense, if you like, they are all natural.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau love

Il n’y a point de folie dont on ne puisse gu

— Jean Jacques Rousseau lie

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.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau truth

Let us give him everything. Let us lavish charms and merit on him. Let him be handsome, very clever, and lovable. He will be sought out by women. But in seeking him out before he loves them, they will unhinge him rather than make a lover out of him. He will have successes, but he will have neither transports nor passion for enjoying them. Since his desires, always provided for in advance, never have time to be born, he feels in the bosom of pleasures only the boredom of constraint.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau love

Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil... Blushes are the sign of guilt; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau knowledge

I had been brought up in a church which decides everything and permits no doubts, so that having rejected one article of faith I was forced to reject the rest; as I could not accept absurd decisions, I was deprived of those which were not absurd. When I was told to believe everything, I could believe nothing, and I knew not where to stop. I consulted the philosophers, I searched their books and examined their various theories; I found them all alike proud, assertive, dogmatic, professing, even in their so-called scepticism, to know everything, proving nothing, scoffing at each other. This last trait, which was common to all of them, struck me as the only point in which they were right. Braggarts in attack, they are weaklings in defence.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau faith

The one thing we do not know is the limit of the knowable. We prefer to trust to chance and to believe what is not true, rather than to own that not one of us can see what really is. A fragment of some vast whole whose bounds are beyond our gaze, a fragment abandoned by its Creator to our foolish quarrels, we are vain enough to want to determine the nature of that whole and our own relations with regard to it.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau nature

died for his country beforedeclared that patriotism was a virtue; Sparta was sober before Socrates extolled sobriety; there were plenty of virtuous men in Greece before he defined virtue. But among the men of his own time where didfind that pure and lofty morality of which he is both the teacher and pattern? The voice of loftiest wisdom arose among the fiercest fanaticism, the simplicity of the most heroic virtues did honour to the most degraded of nations.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau wisdom

Shall we say that the gospel story is the work of the imagination? My friend, such things are not imagined...

— Jean Jacques Rousseau work

La mort de Socrate, philosophant tranquillement avec ses amis, est la plus douce qu’on puisse d

— Jean Jacques Rousseau men

Dirons-nous que l’histoire de l’

— Jean Jacques Rousseau

A young man when he enters society must be preserved from vanity rather than from sensibility; he succumbs rather to the tastes of others than to his own, and self-love is responsible for more libertines than love. Self-love makes more libertines than love.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau love

He who knows enough of things to value them at their true worth never says too much; for he can also judge of the attention bestowed on him and the interest aroused by what he says. 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.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau peace

Habit accustoms us to everything. What we see too much, we no longer imagine; and it is only imagination which makes us feel the ills of others. It is thus by dint of seeing death and suffering that priests and doctors become pitiless.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau death

Women have ready tongues; they talk earlier, more easily, and more pleasantly than men. They are also said to talk more; this may be true, but I am prepared to reckon it to their credit; eyes and mouth are equally busy and for the same cause. A man says what he knows, a woman says what will please; the one needs knowledge, the other taste; utility should be the man's object; the woman speaks to give pleasure. There should be nothing in common but truth.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau truth

So long as chastity is preserved, it is respected; it is despised only after having been lost.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau respect

So, decide to raise them [women] like men. The men will gladly consent to it! The more women want to resemble them, the less women will govern them, and then men will truly be the masters.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau women

Sophie is not beautiful, but in her company men forget beautiful women, and beautiful women are dissatisfied with themselves.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau women

One must choose between making a man or a citizen, for one cannot make both at the same time.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau time

The abuse of books kills science. Believing that we know what we have read, we believe that we can dispense with learning it.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau science

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

— Jean Jacques Rousseau universe

Les Confessions .

— Jean Jacques Rousseau

I have entered on an enterprise which is without precedent, and will have no imitator. I propose to show my fellows a man as nature made him, and this man shall be myself.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau nature

I know my heart, and have studied mankind; I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I at least claim originality, and whether Nature did wisely in breaking the mould with which she formed me, can only be determined after having read this work.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau art

Whenever the last trumpet shall sound, I will present myself before the sovereign judge with this book in my hand, and loudly proclaim, thus have I acted; these were my thoughts; such was I.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau thoughts

J'adore la libert

— Jean Jacques Rousseau

Remorse sleeps during a prosperous period but wakes up in adversity.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau sleep

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

— Jean Jacques Rousseau living

Hatred, as well as love, renders its votaries credulous.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau love

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 read

An account of a visit to thein .

— Jean Jacques Rousseau

The thirst after happiness is never extinguished in the heart of man.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau happiness

He thinks like a philosopher, but governs like a king.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau think

I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau peace

Laws are always useful to those who possess and vexatious to those who have nothing.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau law

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