Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes

Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer (1712-1778)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (June 28, 1712 – July 2, 1778) was a major French-speaking Genevan philosopher of Enlightenment whose political ideas influenced the French Revolution, the development of socialist theory, and the growth of nationalism.

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Alternative Names: Citizen of Geneva • Jean Jacques Rousseau • J. J. Rousseau • Rousseau • J.J. Rousseau • JJ Rousseau

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L'offenseur ne pardonne jamais.

The supreme enjoyment is in satisfaction with oneself ; it is in order to deserve this satisfaction that we are placed on earth and endowed with freedom.

I shall need only myself to be happy.

Chère amie, ne savez-vous pas que la vertu est un état de guerre, et que, pour y vivre, on a toujours quelque combat à rendre contre soi?

Days of absence, sad and dreary,
Clothed in sorrow's dark array,—
Days of absence, I am weary: She I love is far away.

A country cannot subsist well without liberty, nor liberty without virtue.

An honest man nearly always thinks justly.

Accent is the soul of language; it gives to it both feeling and truth.

L'accent est l'âme du discours.

All that time is lost which might be better employed.

Let's go dance under the elms:
Step lively, young lassies.
Let's go dance under the elms:
Gallants, take up your pipes.

Society must be studied in the individual and the individual in society; those who desire to treat politics and morals apart from one another will never understand either

Cultivate and water the young plant before it dies. Its fruits will one day be your delights. Form an enclosure around your child's soul at an early date. Someone else can draw its circumference. but you alone must build the fence.

The mind has its needs, just as the body does. The latter are the
foundations of society; from the former emerge the pleasures of
society. While government and laws take care of the security
and the well being of men in groups, the sciences, letters, and
the arts, less despotic and perhaps more powerful, spread
garlands of flowers over the iron chains which weigh men
down, snuffing out in them the feeling of that original liberty for
which they appear to have been born, and make them love their
slavery by turning them into what are called civilized people.

To live is not to breathe; it is 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. Men have been buried at one hundred who died at their birth. They would have gained from dying young; at least they would have lived up to that time.