Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Maker of the world, but degenerates once it gets into the hands of man
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAUHe 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.
More Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes
-
-
There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
MAN is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
If there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof is most complete. And with all that, who is there who believes in vampires?
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
What good is it looking for our happiness in the opinion of others if we can find it in ourselves?
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
We cannot teach children the danger of lying to men without feeling as men, the greater danger of lying to children.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties.
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 -
In truth, laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to those who have nothing; from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all possess something and none has too much.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
The people of England regards itself as free; but it is grossly mistaken; it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
My love for imaginary objects and my facility in lending myself to them ended by disillusioning me with everything around me, and determined that love of solitude which I have retained ever since that time.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
It is a great evil for a Chief of a nation to be born the enemy of the freedom whose defender he should be.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
The sociable man, always outside himself, is capable of living only in the opinions of others and, so to speak, derives the sentiment of his own existence solely from their judgment.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
From this it follows that, the larger the State, the less the liberty.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
If there were a nation of Gods, it would govern itself democratically. A government so perfect is not suited to men.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
I feel an indescribable ecstasy and delirium in melting, as it were, into the system of being, in identifying myself with the whole of nature.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
Or, rather, let us be more simple and less vain.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
My birth was my first misfortune.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
I feel an indescribable ecstasy and delirium in melting, as it were, into the system of being, in identifying myself with the whole of nature..
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
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.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
Truth is an homage that the good man pays to his own dignity.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
The social pact, far from destroying natural equality, substitutes, on the contrary, a moral and lawful equality for whatever physical inequality that nature may have imposed on mankind; so that however unequal in strength and intelligence, men become equal by covenant and by right.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
To renounce freedom is to renounce one’s humanity, one’s rights as a man and equally one’s duties.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
There is peace in dungeons, but is that enough to make dungeons desirable?
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU