Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The one thing we do not know is the limit of the knowable.Collection: Knowledge
Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping from them.Collection: Escaping
There is peace in dungeons, but is that enough to make dungeons desirable?Collection: Dungeons
In the North the first words are, Help me; in the South, Love me.Collection: Selfishness
At Genoa, the word Liberty may be read over the front of the prisons and on the chains of the galley-slaves. This application of the device is good and just. It is indeed only malefactors of all estates who prevent the citizen from being free. In the country in which all such men were in the galleys, the most perfect liberty would be enjoyed.Collection: Country
I also realized that the philosophers, far from ridding me of my vain doubts, only multiplied the doubts that tormented me and failed to remove any one of them. So I chose another guide and said, Let me follow the Inner Light; it will not lead me so far astray as others have done, or if it does it will be my own fault, and I shall not go so far wrong if I follow my own illusions as if I trusted to their deceits.Collection: Philosophy
The abuse of books kills science. Believing that we know what we have read, we believe that we can dispense with learning it.Collection: Believe
He thinks like a philosopher, but governs like a king.Collection: Kings
Men, in general, are not this or that, they are what they are made to be.Collection: Men
Supreme happiness consists in self-content; that we may gain this self-content, we are placed upon this earth and endowed with freedom.Collection: Self
What, then, is the government? An intermediary body established between the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual communication, and charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance of freedom, civil as well as political.Collection: Communication
A citizen should render to the state all the services he can as soon as the sovereign demands them.Collection: Citizens
I may not be better than other people, but at least I'm different.Collection: People
Gracefulness cannot subsist without ease; delicacy is not debility; nor must a woman be sick in order to please. Infirmity, and sickness may excite our pity, but desire and pleasure require the bloom and vigor of health.Collection: Order
Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given to us by education.Collection: Needs
I may not amount to much, but at least I am unique.Collection: Unique
Remorse sleeps during a prosperous period but wakes up in adversity.Collection: Adversity
For it is in our nature to endure patiently the decrees of fate, but not the ill-will of others.Collection: Fate
Men speak from knowledge, women from imagination.Collection: Men
The writings of women are always cold and pretty like themselves. There is as much wit as you may desire, but never any soul.Collection: Writing
Whoever blushes confesses guilt, true innocence never feels shame.Collection: Guilt
Or, rather, let us be more simple and less vain.Collection: Simple
To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life.Collection: Men
There is no folly of which a man who is not a fool cannot get rid except vanity; of this nothing cures a man except experience of its bad consequences, if indeed anything can cure it.Collection: Men
To study men, we must look close by; to study man, we must learn to look afar; if we are to discover essential characteristics, we must first observe differences.Collection: Science
The mechanism she employs is much more powerful than ours, for all her levers move the human heart.Collection: Powerful
The passions are the voice of the body.Collection: Passion
Abstaining so as really to enjoy, is the epicurism, the very perfection, of reason.Collection: Perfection
At sixteen, the adolescent knows about suffering because he himself has suffered, but he barely knows that other beings also suffer.Collection: Depression
A person who can break wind is not dead.Collection: Wind
Anticipation and Hope are born twins.Collection: Twins
To discover the rules of society that are best suited to nations, there would need to exist a superior intelligence, who could understand the passions of men without feeling any of them, who had no affinity with our nature but knew it to the full, whose happiness was independent of ours, but who would nevertheless make our happiness his concern, who would be content to wait in the fullness of time for a distant glory, and to labour in one age to enjoy the fruits in another. Gods would be needed to give men laws.Collection: Passion
The word ‘slavery’ and ‘right’ are contradictory, they cancel each other out. Whether as between one man and another, or between one man and a whole people, it would always be absurd to say: "I hereby make a covenant with you which is wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; I will respect it so long as I please and you shall respect it as long as I wish.Collection: Men
Every free action has two causes that come together to produce it. One is moral, the will that determines the act; the other is physical, the power that executes the will to act.Collection: Motivational
The members of a body-politic call it "the state" when it is passive, "the sovereign" when it is active, and a "power" when they compare it with others of its kind. Collectively they use the title "people," and they refer to one another individually as "citizens" when speaking of their participation in the authority of the sovereign, and as "subjects" when speaking of their subordination to the laws of the state.Collection: Law
The more humanity owes him, the more society denies him. Every door is shut against him, even when he has a right to its being opened: and if he ever obtains justice, it is with much greater difficulty than others obtain favors.Collection: Doors
It is in man's heart that the life of nature's spectacle exists; to see it, one must feel it.Collection: Life
One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.Collection: Thinking
The French painter Rousseau was once asked why he put a naked woman on a red sofa in the middle of his jungle pictures. He answered, 'I needed a bit of red there.'Collection: Naked
The indifference of children towards meat is one proof that the taste for meat is unnatural; their preference is for vegetable foods...Beware of changing this natural taste and making children flesh-eaters, if not for their health's sake, for the sake of their character; for how can one explain away the fact that great meat-eaters are usually fiercer and more cruel than other men; this has been recognised at all times and in all places.Collection: Children
Too much apparatus, designed to guide us in experiments and to supplement the exactness of our senses, makes us neglect to use those senses...The more ingenious our apparatus, the coarser and more unskillful are our senses. We surround ourselves with tools and fail to use those which nature has provided every one of us.Collection: Technology
Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.Collection: Listening
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.Collection: Men
If, by chance, someone among those men of extraordinary talent is found who has firmness of soul and who refuses to yield to the genius of his age and to debase himself with childish works, woe unto him! He will die in poverty and oblivion.Collection: Men
He who pretends to look on death without fear lies. All men are afraid of dying, this is the great law of sentient beings, without which the entire human species would soon be destroyed.Collection: Death
It is believed that physiognomy is only a simple development of the features already marked out by nature. It is my opinion, however, that in addition to this development, the features come insensibly to be formed and assume their shape from the frequent and habitual expression of certain affections of the soul. These affections are marked on the countenance; nothing is more certain than this; and when they turn into habits, they must leave on it durable impressions.Collection: Simple
From the first moment of life, men ought to begin learning to deserve to live; and, as at the instant of birth we partake of the rights of citizenship, that instant ought to be the beginning of the exercise of our duty.Collection: Exercise
War is then not a relationship between one man and another, but a relationship between one State and another, in which individuals are enemies only by accident, not as men, nor even as citizens, but as soldiers; not as members of the fatherland, but as its defenders. Finally, any State can only have other States, and not men, as enemies, inasmuch as it is impossible to fix a true relation between things of different natures.Collection: War