Top 400 Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 9

51. “Happiness: a good bank account, a good cook, and a good digestion.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

53. “Take the course opposite to custom and you will almost always do well.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

54. “Universal silence must be taken to imply the consent of the people.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

55. “Whatever may be our natural talents, the art of writing is not acquired all at once.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

56. “Liberty is obedience to the law which one has laid down for oneself.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

57. “Luxury either comes of riches or makes them necessary; it corrupts at once rich and poor, the rich by possession and the poor by covetousness.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

58. “We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

59. “Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

60. “Teach by doing whenever you can, and only fall back upon words when doing it is out of the question.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

61. “Abstract truth is the eye of reason.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

63. “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.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

65. “The empire of woman is an empire of softness, of address, of complacency. Her commands are caresses, her menaces are tears.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

66. “One can buy anything with money except morality.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

67. “Supreme happiness consists in self-content; that we may gain this self-content, we are placed upon this earth and endowed with freedom.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

68. “The happiest is he who suffers least; the most miserable is he who enjoys least.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

69. “When a man dies he clutches in his hands only that which he has given away during his lifetime.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

70. “Everything degenerates in the hands of man.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

71. “Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is; the people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived, and on such occasions only does it seem to will what is bad.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

73. “General abstract truth is the most precious of all blessings; without it, man is blind; it is the eye of reason.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

74. “Those people who treat politics and morality separately will never understand either of them.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

75. “War then, is a relation – not between man and man but between state and state and individuals are enemies only accidentally not as men, nor even as citizens but as soldiers not as members of their country, but as its defenders.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

77. “What, then, is the government? An intermediary body established between the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual communication, a body charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance of freedom, both civil and political.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

78. “Days of absence, sad and dreary, Clothed in sorrow’s dark array, – Days of absence, I am weary; She I love is far away. Poetic Verse by.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

80. “He thinks like a philosopher, but governs like a king.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

81. “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.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

82. “A feeble body weakens the mind.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

83. “Every free action has two causes that come together to produce it. One is moral, the will that determines the act; the other is physical, the power that executes the will to act.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

84. “We cannot work for others without working for ourselves.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

85. “Women, in general, are not attracted to art at all, nor knowledge, and not at all to genius.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

86. “The English think they are free. They are free only during the election of members of parliament.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

87. “Cities are the abyss of the human species.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

88. “Every man having been born free and master of himself, no one else may under any pretext whatever subject him without his consent. To assert that the son of a slave is born a slave is to assert that he is not born a man.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

89. “Or, rather, let us be more simple and less vain.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

90. “We cannot teach children the danger of telling lies to men without realising, on the man’s part, the danger of telling lies to children. A single untruth on the part of the master will destroy the results of his education.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

91. “Liberty is not to be found in any form of government; she is in the heart of the free man; he bears her with him everywhere.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

92. “You are worried about seeing him spend his early years in doing nothing. What! Is it nothing to be happy? Nothing to skip, play and run around all day long? Never in his life will he be so busy again.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

93. “Temperance and labor are the two best physicians of man; labor sharpens the appetite, and temperance prevents from indulging to excess.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

95. “To live is not merely to breathe; it is to act; it is to make use of our organs, senses, faculties – of all those parts of ourselves which give us the feeling of existence.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

96. “A paralyzed man who wants to walk OR an agile man who does not want to walk will both remain neutral in nature.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

97. “It is manifestly contrary to the law of nature, however defined, that a handful of people should gorge themselves with superfluities while the hungry majority goes in need of necessities.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

98. “The world is the book of women. Whatever knowledge they may possess is more commonly acquired by observation than by reading.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

99. “Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

100. “Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Maker of the world, but degenerates once it gets into the hands of man.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau