Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)

Quotes

• He who is slowest in making a promise is most faithful in its performance.

• Never exceed your rights, and they will soon become unlimited.

• Good laws lead to the making of better ones; bad ones bring about worse.

• Happiness: a good bank account, a good cook and a good digestion.

• The happiest is the person who suffers the least pain; the most miserable who enjoys the least pleasure.

• Your first appearance, he said to me, is the gauge by which you will be measured; try to manage that you may go beyond yourself in after times, but beware of ever doing less.

• The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty.

• Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.

• The person who has lived the most is not the one with the most years but the one with the richest experiences.

• One loses all the time which he might employ to better purpose.

• Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

• Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

• Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.

• The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it

• Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.

• God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.

• 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.

• To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. For he who renounces everything no indemnity is possible. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man's nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts.

• Society's institutions, like government, schools, the arts, and the media, corrupt naturally good individuals.