Quotes from Jean Jacques Rousseau

What wisdom can you find greater than kindness.

Every person has a right to risk their own life for the preservation of it.

Trust your heart rather than your head.

There is no evildoer who could not be made good for something.

People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little. It is plain than an ignorant person thinks everything he does know important, and he tells it to everybody. But a well-educated man is not so ready to display his learning; he would have too much to say, and he sees that there is much more to be said, so he holds his peace.

Our wisdom is slavish prejudice, our customs consist in control, constraint, compulsion. Civilised man is born and dies a slave. The infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the corpse is nailed down in his coffin. All his life long man is imprisoned by our institutions.

Nothing on this earth is worth buying at the price of human blood.

Teach him to live rather than to avoid death: life is not breath, but action, the use of our senses, our mind, our faculties, every part of ourselves which makes us conscious of our being. Life consists less in length of days than in the keen sense of living. A man maybe buried at a hundred and may never have lived at all. He would have fared better had he died young.

Every artists wants to be applauded

It is a great and beautiful spectacle to see a man somehow emerging from oblivion by his own efforts, dispelling with the light of his reason the shadows in which nature had enveloped him, rising above himself, soaring in his mind right up to the celestial regions, moving, like the sun, with giant strides through the vast extent of the universe, and, what is even greater and more difficult, returning to himself in order to study man there and learn of his nature, his obligations, and his end.

I don't know how this lively and dumb scene would have ended , or how long I might have remained immoveable in this ridiculous and delightful situation , had we not been interrupted.

Gambling is only the resource of those who do not know what to do with themselves

Happiness is a good bank account, a good cook, and a good digestion.

All ran to meet their chains thinking they secured their freedom, for although they had enough reason to feel the advantages of political establishment, they did not have enough experience to foresee its dangers.

In fact, the real source of all thosedifferences, is that the savage lives within himself, whereas thecitizen, constantly beside himself, knows only how to live in theopinion of others; insomuch that it is, if I may say so, merely fromtheir judgment that he derives the consciousness of his own existence.

A taste for ostentation is rarely associated in the same souls with a taste for honesty. No, it is not possible that minds degraded by a multitude of futile concerns would ever raise themselves to anything great. Even when they had the strength for that, the courage would be missing.

Liberty is like rich food and strong wine: the strong natures accustomed to them thrive and grow even stronger on them; but they deplete, inebriate and destroy the weak.

We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man's estate, is the gift of education.

It is in order not to become victim of an assassin that we consent to die if we become assassins.

My birth was my first misfortune.

you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and that the earth itself belongs to nobody

When innocent and virtuous men liked to have gods as witnesses of their actions, they lived with them in the same huts. But having soon become evil, they grew weary of these inconvenient spectators and relegated them to magnificent temples.

I will simply ask: What is philosophy? What do the writings of the best known philosophers contain? What are the lessons of these friends of wisdom? To listen to them, would one not take them for a troupe of charlatans crying out in a public square, each from his own corner: Come to me. I'm the only one who is not wrong?

But so long as power remains by itself on one side, and enlightenment and wisdom isolated on the other, wise men will rarely think of great things, princes will more rarely carry out fine actions, and the people will continue to be vile, corrupt, and unhappy.