Quotes from Jean-Jacques Rousseau

We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.

I only see clearly what I remember.

You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one.

He who is most slow in making a promise is the most faithful in performance of it.

Liberty is obedience to the law which one has laid down for oneself.

Childhood is the sleep of reason.

An honest man nearly always thinks justly.

No man has any natural authority over his fellow men.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

At sixteen, the adolescent knows about suffering because he himself has suffered, but he barely knows that other beings also suffer.

Do not judge and you will never be mistaken.

The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said, "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society.

Everything is good when it leaves the hands of the Creator; everything degenerates in the hands of man.

You are worried about seeing him spend his early years in doing nothing. What! Is it nothing to be happy? Nothing to skip, play, and run around all day long? Never in his life will he be so busy again.

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

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

Temperance and labor are the two true physicians of man.

In the strict sense of the term, a true democracy has never existed, and never will exist.

What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

God made me and broke the mold.

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.

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.

Nature does not deceive us; it is we who deceive ourselves.