Quotes from Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I don't know what is truth,but I can tell you how to find it!

An intelligent being, is the active principle of all things. One must have renounced all common sense to doubt it, and it is a waste of time to try to prove such self evident truth.

Sacrifice life to truth.

She was dull, unattractive, couldn't tell the time, count money or tie her own shoe laces... But I loved her

O love, if I regret the age when one savors you, it is not for the hour of pleasure, but for the one that follows it.

Love, known to the person by whom it is inspired, becomes more bearable.

The freedom of Mankind does not lie in the fact that can do what we want, but that we do not have to do that which we do not want.

I have never believed that man's freedom consisted in doing what he wants, but rather in never doing what he does not want to do.

Remorse sleeps during prosperity but awakes bitter consciousness during adversity.

Most nations, as well as people are impossible only in their youth; they become incorrigible as they grow older.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

A paralyzed man who wants to walk OR an agile man who does not want to walk will both remain neutral in nature.

Every artists wants to be applauded

Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.

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

Base souls have no faith in great individuals.

Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil.

Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone.

People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.

Social man lives constantly outside himself.

That man is truly free who desires what he is able to perform, and does what he desires.

Temperance and labor are the two best physicians of man; labor sharpens the appetite, and temperance prevents from indulging to excess

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?

Great men never make bad use of their superiority. They see it and feel it and are not less modest. The more they have, the more they know their own deficiencies.