Nature made me happy and good, and if I am otherwise, it is society’s fault.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAUTo write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.
More Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes
-
-
There is no evildoer who could not be made good for something.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves.
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 -
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 -
Quit thy childhood, my friend, and wake up!
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
All my misfortunes come of having thought too well of my fellows.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘this is mine’, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
My birth was my first misfortune.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
From this it follows that, the larger the State, the less the liberty.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
The imagination which causes so many ravages among us, never speaks to the heart of savages.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
A taste for ostentation is rarely associated in the same souls with a taste for honesty.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU -
Happiness requires three things, a good bank account, a good cook, and good digestion.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU