Top 400 Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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2. “I prefer liberty with danger to peace with slavery.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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3. “Freedom is the power to choose our own chains.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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6. “There are always four sides to a story: your side, their side, the truth and what really happened.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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7. “I have never believed that man’s freedom consisted in doing what he wants, but rather in never doing what he does not want to do.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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8. “The money you have gives you freedom; the money you pursue enslaves you.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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9. “People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

10. “The freedom of Mankind does not lie in the fact that can do what we want, but that we do not have to do that which we do not want.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

11. “Equality, because without it there can be no liberty.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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12. “I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

13. “Insults are the arguments employed by those who are in the wrong.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

14. “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.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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15. “Rather suffer an injustice than commit one.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

17. “The general will is always right.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

18. “All kinds of frankness and honesty are terrible crimes in the eyes of society.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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19. “The man who gets the most out of life is not the one who has lived it longest, but the one who has felt life most deeply.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

20. “Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping from them.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

21. “The falsification of history has done more to impede human development than any one thing known to mankind.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

22. “Childhood has it’s own way of seeing, thinking, and feeling, and nothing is more foolish than to try to substitute ours for theirs.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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23. “I may be no better, but at least I am different.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

24. “Trust your heart rather than your head.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

25. “We are reduced to asking others what we are. We never dare to ask ourselves.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

26. “Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

27. “Whoever refuses to obey the general will will be forced to do so by the entire body; this means merely that he will be forced to be free.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

28. “To 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.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

29. “Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given to us by education.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

30. “Smell is the sense of memory and desire.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

31. “Do not judge, and you will never be mistaken.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

32. “Finance is a slave’s word.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

34. “Living is not breathing but doing.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

37. “What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

38. “Men speak from knowledge, women from imagination.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

39. “We should not teach children the sciences; but give them a taste for them.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

40. “You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

41. “I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind works only with my legs.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

42. “A man says what he knows, a woman says what will please.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

43. “Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

44. “It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

45. “Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

46. “At sixteen, the adolescent knows about suffering because he himself has suffered, but he barely knows that other beings also suffer.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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47. “Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

48. “Conscience is the voice of the soul; the passions of the body.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

49. “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

50. “Quit thy childhood, my friend, and wake up!”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Featured in: Responsibility Quotes, Quotes About Childhood