Jean Jacques Rousseau

“Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.”

“To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties.”

“رُحت أتأمل وضع بني آدم البئيسين، يسبحون في بحر هائل من الآراء لا دليل لهم ولا مشير. تتقاذفهم أهواؤهم الهائجة، لا معين لهم سوى ملاح غير مجرب، يجهل الطريق، لا يعرف من أين أتى وأين يتجه. كنت أسرّ لنفسي: أتوخى الحق، أبحث عنه ولا أتبيّنه. ليرشدني إليه مرشد وسأتعلق به طول حياتي. لماذا يحتجب الحق عن قلب متشوق إليه متحمس لعبادته ؟”

“It is as if my heart and my brain did not belong to the same person. Feelings come quicker than lightning and fill my soul, but they bring me no illumination; they burn me and dazzle me.”

“I believed that I was approaching the end of my days without having tasted to the full any of the pleasures for which my heart thirsted...without having ever tasted that passion which, through lack of an object, was always suppressed. ...The impossibility of attaining the real persons precipitated me into the land of chimeras; and seeing nothing that existed worthy of my exalted feelings, I fostered them in an ideal world which my creative imagination soon peopled with beings after my own heart.”

“I was not much afraid of punishment, I was only afraid of disgrace.But that I feared more than death, more than crime, more than anything in the world. I should have rejoiced if the earth had swallowed me up and stifled me in the abyss. But my invincible sense of shame prevailed over everything . It was my shame that made me impudent, and the more wickedly I behaved the bolder my fear of confession made me. I saw nothing but the horror of being found out, of being publicly proclaimed, to my face, as a thief, as a liar, and slanderer.”

“So finally we tumble into the abyss, we ask God why he has made us so feeble. But, in spite of ourselves, He replies through our consciences: 'I have made you too feeble to climb out of the pit, because i made you strong enough not to fall in.”

“The Abbe de Saint-Pierre suggested an association of all the states of Europe to maintain perpetual peace among themselves. Is this association practicable, and supposing that it were established, would it be likely to last?”

“Das einzige Mittel, den Irrtum zu vermeiden, ist die Unwissenheit.”

“She was dull, unattractive, couldn't tell the time, count money or tie her own shoe laces... But I loved her”

“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.”

“Trust your heart rather than your head.”

“Why should we build our happiness on the opinons of others, when we can find it in our own hearts?”

“If there were a nation of Gods, it would govern itself democratically. A government so perfect is not suited to men.”

“I have entered upon a performance which is without example, whoseaccomplishment will have no imitator. I mean to present myfellow-mortals with a man in all the integrity of nature; and this manshall be myself.I know my heart, and have studied mankind; I am not made like any one Ihave been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if notbetter, I at least claim originality, and whether Nature did wisely inbreaking the mould with which she formed me, can only be determined afterhaving read this work.Whenever the last trumpet shall sound, I will present myself before thesovereign judge with this book in my hand, and loudly proclaim, thus haveI acted; these were my thoughts; such was I. With equal freedom andveracity have I related what was laudable or wicked, I have concealed nocrimes, added no virtues; and if I have sometimes introduced superfluousornament, it was merely to occupy a void occasioned by defect of memory:I may have supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, buthave never asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood. Such as I was, Ihave declared myself; sometimes vile and despicable, at others, virtuous,generous and sublime; even as thou hast read my inmost soul: Powereternal! assemble round thy throne an innumerable throng of myfellow-mortals, let them listen to my confessions, let them blush at mydepravity, let them tremble at my sufferings; let each in his turn exposewith equal sincerity the failings, the wanderings of his heart, and, ifhe dare, aver, I was better than that man.”

“There is nothing better than the encouragement of a good friend.”

“Généralement, les gens qui savant peu parlent becoup, et les gens qui savant beaucoup parlent peu.”

“Truth is an homage that the good man pays to his own dignity.”

“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.”

“He who blushes is already guilty.”

“The indolence I love is not that of a lazy fellow who sits with his arms across in total inaction, and thinks no more than he acts, but that of a child which is incessantly in motion doing nothing, and that of a dotard who wanders from his subject. I love to amuse myself with trifles, by beginning a hundred things and never finishing one of them, by going or coming as I take either into my head, by changing my project at every instant, by following a fly through all its windings, in wishing to overturn a rock to see what is under it, by undertaking with ardor the work of ten years, and abandoning it without regret at the end of ten minutes; finally, in musing from morning until night without order or coherence, and in following in everything the caprice of a moment.”

“The continual emotion that is felt in the theater excites us, enervates us, enfeebles us, and makes us less able to resist our passions. And the sterile interest taken in virtue serves only to satisfy our vanity without obliging us to practice it.”

“Those who read this will not fail to laugh at my gallantries, and remark, that after very promising preliminaries, my most forward adventures concluded by a kiss of the hand: yet be not mistaken, reader, in your estimate of my enjoyments; I have, perhaps, tasted more real pleasure in my amours, which concluded by a kiss of the hand, than you will ever have in yours, which, at least, begin there.”

“...in respect of riches, no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself.”

“In a well governed state, there are few punishments, not because there are many pardons, but because criminals are rare; it is when a state is in decay that the multitude of crimes is a guarantee of impunity.”

“To renounce freedom is to renounce one's humanity, one's rights as a man and equally one's duties.”

“I had brought from Paris the national prejudice against Italian music; but I had also received from nature that acute sensibility against which prejudices are powerless. I soon contracted the passion it inspires in all those born to understand it.”

“There is no evildoer who could not be made good for something. ”

“Every artists wants to be applauded”

“If there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul.”

“It is reason which breeds pride and reflection which fortifies it; reason which turns man inward into himself; reason which separates him from everything which troubles or affects him. It is philosophy which isolates a man, and prompts him to say in secret at the sight of another suffering: 'Perish if you will; I am safe.' No longer can anything but dangers to society in general disturb the tranquil sleep of the philosopher or drag him from his bed. A fellow-man may with impunity be murdered under his window, for the philosopher has only to put his hands over his ears and argue a little with himself to prevent nature, which rebels inside him, from making him identify himself with the victim of the murder. The savage man entirely lacks this admirable talent, and for want of wisdom and reason he always responds recklessly to the first promptings of human feeling.”

“Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it. ”

“Gambling is only the resource of those who do not know what to do with themselves”

“Man is born free but today everywhere he is in chains.”

“I know the feelings of my heart, and I know men. I am not made like any of those I have seen; I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different. Whether Nature has acted rightly or wrongly in destroying the mould in which she cast me, can only be decided after I have been read.”

“I have never thought, for my part, that man's freedom consists in his being able to do whatever he wills, but that he should not, by any human power, be forced to do what is against his will.”

“All my misfortunes come of having thought too well of my fellows.”

“In any case, frequent punishments are a sign of weakness or slackness in the government. There is no man so bad that he cannot be made good for something. No man should be put to death, even as an example, if he can be left to live without danger to society.”

“Liberty is like rich food and strong wine: the strong natures accustomed to them thrive and grow even stronger on them; but they deplete, inebriate and destroy the weak.”

“My illusions about the world caused me to think that in order to benefit by my reading I ought to possess all the knowledge the book presupposed. I was very far indeed from imagining that often the author did not possess it himself, but had extracted it from other books, as and when he needed it. This foolish conviction forced me to stop every moment, and to rush incessantly from one book to another; sometimes before coming to the tenth page of the one I was trying to read I should, by this extravagant method, have had to run through whole libraries. Nevertheless I stuck to it so persistently that I wasted infinite time, and my head became so confused that I could hardly see or take in anything.”

“The extreme inequality of our ways of life, the excess of idleness among some and the excess of toil among others, the ease of stimulating and gratifying our appetites and our senses, the over-elaborate foods of the rich, which inflame and overwhelm them with indigestion, the bad food of the poor, which they often go withotu altogether, so hat they over-eat greedily when they have the opportunity; those late nights, excesses of all kinds, immoderate transports of every passion, fatigue, exhaustion of mind, the innumerable sorrows and anxieties that people in all classes suffer, and by which the human soul is constantly tormented: these are the fatal proofs that most of our ills are of our own making, and that we might have avoided nearly all of them if only we had adhered to the simple, unchanging and solitary way of life that nature ordained for us. ”

“Finance is a slave's word.”

“Teach your scholar to observe the phenomena of nature; you will soon rouse his curiosity, but if you would have it grow, do not be in too great a hurry to satisfy this curiosity. Put the problems before him and let him solve them himself. Let him know nothing because you have told him, but because he has learnt it for himself. Let him not be taught science, let him discover it. If ever you substitute authority for reason he will cease to reason; he will be a mere plaything of other people's thoughts.”

“They say that Caliph Omar, when consulted about what had to be done with the library of Alexandria, answered as follows: 'If the books of this library contain matters opposed to the Koran, they are bad and must be burned. If they contain only the doctrine of the Koran, burn them anyway, for they are superfluous.' Our learned men have cited this reasoning as the height of absurdity. However, suppose Gregory the Great was there instead of Omar and the Gospel instead of the Koran. The library would still have been burned, and that might well have been the finest moment in the life of this illustrious pontiff.”

“To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness.”

“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. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, "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.”

“The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.”

“We must powder our wigs; that is why so many poor people have no bread.”

“I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.”

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