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JeanJacques Rousseau Quotes | Quotes said by JeanJacques Rousseau

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #1

    ...an animal, at the end of a few months, is what it will be all its life; and its species, at the end of a thousand years, is what it was in the first of those thousand years. Why is man alone subject to becoming an imbecile?

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #2

    ...there is no real advance in human reason, for what we gain in one direction we lose in another; for all minds start from the same point, and as the time spent in learning what others have thought is so much time lost in learning to think for ourselves, we have more acquired knowledge and less vigor of mind. Our minds like our arms are accustomed to use tools for everything, and to do nothing for themselves.

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #3

    [T]he man who meditates is a depraved animal.

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #4

    [T]he mere impulse of appetite is slavery, while obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty.

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #5

    »Die Gewohnheit hat mich das Landleben so sehr liebgewinnen lassen, dass ich sofort vor Traurigkeit sterben würde, könnte ich keine blühenden Bäume mehr von Nahem sehen; das ist wohl keine gute Ausgangslage, um die schwarzen Dämpfe in den Straßen dieser großen Stadt einzuatmen, (…).

    [Rousseau an Comtesse de Boufflers, Môtiers-Travers, 20. August 1762]

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #6

    A child who passes through many hands in turn, can never be well brought up. At every change he makes a secret comparison, which continually tends to lessen his respect for those who control him, and with it their authority over him. If once he thinks there are grown-up people with no more sense than children the authority of age is destroyed and his education is ruined.

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #7

    A feeble body makes a feeble mind. I do not know what doctors cure us of, but I know this: they infect us with very deadly diseases, cowardice, timidity, credulity, the fear of death. What matter if they make the dead walk, we have no need of corpses; they fail to give us men, and it is men we need.

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #8

    A feeble body weakens the mind.

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #9

    A taste for ostentation is rarely associated in the same souls with a taste for honesty

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #10

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

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #11

    Ah,' thought the king sadly, shrugging his shoulders, I see clearly that if one has a crazy wife, one cannot avoid being a fool.'

    (Queen Fantasque)

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #12

    All wickedness comes from weakness. The child is wicked only because he is weak. Make him strong; he will be good. He who could do everything would never do harm.

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #13

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

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #14

    An unbroken horse erects his mane, paws the ground and starts back impetuously at the sight of the bridle; while one which is properly trained suffers patiently even whip and spur: so savage man will not bend his neck to the yoke to which civilised man submits without a murmur, but prefers the most turbulent state of liberty to the most peaceful slavery. We cannot therefore, from the servility of nations already enslaved, judge of the natural disposition of mankind for or against slavery; we should go by the prodigious efforts of every free people to save itself from oppression. I know that the former are for ever holding forth in praise of the tranquillity they enjoy in their chains, and that they call a state of wretched servitude a state of peace: miserrimam servitutem pacem appellant. But when I observe the latter sacrificing pleasure, peace, wealth, power and life itself to the preservation of that one treasure, which is so disdained by those who have lost it; when I see free-born animals dash their brains out against the bars of their cage, from an innate impatience of captivity; when I behold numbers of naked savages, that despise European pleasures, braving hunger, fire, the sword and death, to preserve nothing but their independence, I feel that it is not for slaves to argue about liberty.

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #15

    Ancient politicians talked incessantly about morality and virtue; our politicians talk only about business and money. One will tell you that in a particular country a man is worth the sum he could be sold for in Algiers; another, by following this calculation, will find countries where a man is worth nothing, and others where he is worth less than nothing. They assess men like herds of livestock. According to them, a man has no value to the State apart from what he consumes in it. Thus one Sybarite would have been worth at least thirty Lacedaemonians. Would someone therefore hazard a guess which of these two republics, Sparta or Sybaris, was overthrown by a handful of peasants and which one made Asia tremble?

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #16

    Are your principles not engraved in all hearts, and in order to learn your laws is it not enough to go back into oneself and listen to the voice of one's conscience in the silence of the passions? There you have true philosophy. Let us learn to be satisfied with that, and without envying the glory of those famous men who are immortalized in the republic of letters, let us try to set between them and us that glorious distinction which people made long ago between two great peoples: one knew how to speak well; the other how to act well.

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #17

    As she put it, she knew of nothing so ravishing as having a child whom she could whip whenever she was in a bad mood.

    (The Queen Fantasque)

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #18

    As soon as any man says of the affairs of the State What does it matter to me? the State may be given up for lost.

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #19

    Being wealthy isn't just a question of having lots of money. It's a question of what we want. Wealth isn't an absolute, it's relative to desire. Every time we seek something that we can't afford, we can be counted as poor, how much money we may actually have.

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #20

    But if the abberations of foolish youth made me forget suc wise lessons for a time,I have the happiness to sense at last that whatever the inclination one may have toward vice,it is difficult for an education in which the heart is involved to remain forever lost.

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #21

    But in some great souls, who consider themselves as citizens of the world, and forcing the imaginary barriers that separate people from people...

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #22

    Children are taught to look down on their nurses (nannies), to treat them as mere servants. When their task is completed the child is withdrawn or the nurse is dismissed. Her visits to her foster-child are discouraged by a cold reception. After a few years the child never sees her again. The mother expects to take her place, and to repair by her cruelty the results of her own neglect. But she is greatly mistaken; she is making an ungrateful foster-child, not an affectionate son; she is teaching him ingratitude, and she is preparing him to despise at a later day the mother who bore him, as he now despises his nurse.

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #23

    Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #24

    Die Freiheit des Menschen liegt nicht darin, dass er tun kann, was er will, sondern dass er nicht tun muss, was er nicht will.

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #25

    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.

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #26

    El hombre ha nacido libre y en todas partes se halla encadenado.

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #27

    Europe had fallen back into the barbarity of the first ages. People from this part of world, so enlightened today, lived a few centuries ago in a state worse than ignorance. Some sort of learned jargon much more despicable than ignorance had usurped the name of knowledge and set up an almost invincible obstacle in the way of its return. A revolution was necessary to bring men back to common sense, and it finally came from a quarter where one would least expect it. It was the stupid Muslim, the eternal blight on learning, who brought about its rebirth among us.

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #28

    Even the soberest judged it requisite to sacrifice one part of their liberty to ensure the other, as a man, dangerously wounded in any of his limbs, readily parts with it to save the rest of his body.

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #29

    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?

  • JeanJacques Rousseau Quote #30

    Every man having been born free and master of himself, no one else may under any pretext whatever subject him without his consent. To assert that the son of a slave is born a slave is to assert that he is not born a man.

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