Quotes from Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Watch a cat when it enters a room for the first time. It searches and smells about, it is not quiet for a moment, it trusts nothing until it has examined and made acquaintance with everything.

The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it.

Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to save time, but to squander it.

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

Yes, if the life and death of Socrates are those of a wise man, the life and death of Jesus are those of a god.

When something an affliction happens to you, you either let it defeat you, or you defeat it.

How many famous and high-spirited heroes have lived a day too long?

Our affections as well as our bodies are in perpetual flux.

We lose all that time which we might employ better.

Little privations are easily endured when the heart is better treated than the body.

Days of absence, sad and dreary, Clothed in sorrow's dark array, - Days of absence, I am weary; She I love is far away.

Religious persecutors are not believers, they are rascals.

I long remained a child, and I am still one in many respects.

Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.

Trust your heart rather than your head.

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

There are always four sides to a story: your side, their side, the truth and what really happened.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Self-love is an instrument useful but dangerous; it often wounds the hand which makes use of it, and seldom does good without doing harm.

In the North the first words are, Help me; in the South, Love me.

Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.

General abstract truth is the most precious of all blessings; without it, man is blind; it is the eye of reason.

The truth brings no man a fortune.

Accent is the soul of language; it gives to it both feeling and truth.