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“All of my misfortunes come from having thought too well of my fellows.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“A feeble body weakens the mind.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Happiness: a good bank account, a good cook, and a good digestion.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Childhood is the sleep of reason.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Every man has a right to risk his own life for the preservation of it.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“The body politic, as well as the human body, begins to die as soon as it is born, and carries itself the causes of its destruction.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Fame is but the breath of people, and that often unwholesome.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“No true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“When something an affliction happens to you, you either let it defeat you, or you defeat it.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Heroes are not known by the loftiness of their carriage; the greatest braggarts are generally the merest cowards.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“I have always said and felt that true enjoyment can not be described.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Most nations, as well as people are impossible only in their youth; they become incorrigible as they grow older.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Remorse sleeps during prosperity but awakes bitter consciousness during adversity.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“I long remained a child, and I am still one in many respects.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“It is unnatural for a majority to rule, for a majority can seldom be organized and united for specific action, and a minority can.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Money is the seed of money, and the first guinea is sometimes more difficult to acquire than the second million.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“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.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“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.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
