Quotes from Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I am not worried about pleasing clever minds or fashionable people. In every period there will be men fated to be governed by the opinions of their century, their country, and their society. For that very reason, a freethinker or philosopher today would have been nothing but a fanatic at the time of the League.* One must not write for such readers, if one wishes to live beyond one's own age.

Among the many short cuts to science, we badly need someone to teach us the art of learning with difficulty.

Man is born free but today everywhere he is in chains.

T]he mere impulse of appetite is slavery, while obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty.

Childhood has its own way of seeing, thinking, and feeling, and nothing is more foolish than to try to substitute ours for theirs.

T]he man who meditates is a depraved animal.

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

I do not know the art of being clear to those who do not want to be attentive.

The ever-recurring law of necessity soon teaches a man to do what he does not like, so as to avert evils which he would dislike still more... this foresight, well or ill used, is the source of all the wisdom or the wretchedness of mankind.

God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.

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

My passions, when roused, are intense, and, so long as I am activated by them, nothing equals my impetuosity. I no longer know moderation, respect, fear, propriety; I am cynical, brazen, violent, fearless; no sense of shame deters me, no danger alarms me. Except for the object of my passion, the whole world is as nothing to me; but this only lasts for a moment, and the next I am plunged into utter dejection.

Die Freiheit des Menschen liegt nicht darin, dass er tun kann, was er will, sondern dass er nicht tun muss, was er nicht will.

I ask: which of the two, civil or natural life, is more likely to become insufferable to those who live it? We see about us practically no people who do not complain about their existence; many even deprive themselves of it to the extent they are able, and the combination of divine and human laws is hardly enough to stop this disorder.

If one divided all of human science into two parts - the one common to all men, the other particular to the learned - the latter would be quite small in comparison with the former. But we are hardly aware of what is generally attained, because it is attained without thought and even before the age of reason; because, moreover, learning is noticed only by its differences, and as in algebraic equations, common quantities count for nothing.

The wisest writers devote themselves to what a man ought to know, without asking what a child is capable of learning.

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.

To live is not to breathe but to act.

It is difficult for an education in which the heart is involved to remain forever lost.

Généralement, les gens qui savant peu parlent becoup, et les gens qui savant beaucoup parlent peu.

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.

Social man lives always outside himself; he knows how to live only in the opinion of others, it is, so to speak, from their judgement alone that he derives the sense of his own existence.

I am a hundred times happier in my solitude than I could be if I lived among them.

La jeunesse est le temps d'étudier la sagesse; la vieillesse est le temps de la pratiquer.