Quotes from Jean-Jacques Rousseau

If there were a people consisting of gods, they would be governed democratically. So perfect a government is not suitable to men.

Temperance and labor are the two real physicians of man.

Everything degenerates in the hands of man.

To study men, we must look close by; to study man, we must learn to look afar; if we are to discover essential characteristics, we must first observe differences.

There is no folly of which a man who is not a fool cannot get rid except vanity; of this nothing cures a man except experience of its bad consequences, if indeed anything can cure it.

He who pretends to look on death without fear lies. All men are afraid of dying, this is the great law of sentient beings, without which the entire human species would soon be destroyed.

With children use force; with men reason; such is the natural order of things. The wise man requires no law.

Liberty is not to be found in any form of government; she is in the heart of the free man; he bears her with him everywhere.

A man says what he knows, a woman says what will please.

Men will argue more philosophically about the human heart; but women will read the heart of man better than they.

A man speaks of what he knows, a woman of what pleases her: the one requires knowledge, the other taste.

Many men, seemingly impelled by fortune, hasten forward to meet misfortune half way.

A man who is not a fool can rid himself of every folly except vanity.

Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.

Her dignity consists in being unknown to the world; her glory is in the esteem of her husband; her pleasures in the happiness of her family.

One can buy anything with money except morality.

The money you have gives you freedom; the money you pursue enslaves you.

The money that we possess is the instrument of liberty, that which we lack and strive to obtain is the instrument of slavery.

Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.

Every free action has two causes that come together to produce it. One is moral, the will that determines the act; the other is physical, the power that executes the will to act.

Nature wants children to be children before men... Childhood has its own seeing, thinking and feeling.

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.

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.

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.