Top 400 Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “The apparent ease with which children learn is their ruin.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

152. “If all were perfect Christians, individuals would do their duty; the people would be obedient to the laws, the magistrates incorrupt, and there would be neither vanity nor luxury in such a state.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

153. “My liveliest delight was in having conquered myself.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

154. “The truth brings no man a fortune.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

155. “A born king is a very rare being.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

156. “The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had some one pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: “Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

157. “Nature made me happy and good, and if I am otherwise, it is society’s fault.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

158. “Self-love is an instrument useful but dangerous; it often wounds the hand which makes use of it, and seldom does good without doing harm.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

159. “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

160. “God made me and broke the mold.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

161. “Gratitude is a duty which ought to be paid, but which none have a right to expect.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

162. “Never exceed your rights, and they will soon become unlimited.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

163. “Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to save time, but to squander it.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

164. “I perceive God everywhere in His works. I sense Him in me; I see Him all around me.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

165. “Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

166. “It is in man’s heart that the life of nature’s spectacle exists; to see it, one must feel it.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

167. “It is pity in which the state of nature takes the place of laws, morals and virtues, with the added advantage that no one there is tempted to disobey its gentle voice.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

168. “There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

169. “In truth, laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to those who have nothing; from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all possess something and none has too much.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

170. “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.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

171. “Reason deceives us; conscience, never.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

172. “One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

173. “There is peace in dungeons, but is that enough to make dungeons desirable?”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

174. “Heroes are not known by the loftiness of their carriage; the greatest braggarts are generally the merest cowards.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

175. “The greatest braggarts are usually the biggest cowards.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

176. “Yes, if the life and death of Socrates are those of a wise man, the life and death of Jesus are those of a god.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

177. “As long as there are rich people in the world, they will be desirous of distinguishing themselves from the poor.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

178. “Do to others as you would have others do to you, inspires all men with that other maxim of natural goodness a great deal less perfect, but perhaps more useful: Do good to yourself with as little prejudice as you can to others.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

179. “It is easier to conquer than to administer. With enough leverage, a finger could overturn the world; but to support the world, one must have the shoulders of Hercules.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

180. “Our affections as well as our bodies are in perpetual flux.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

181. “That man is truly free who desires what he is able to perform, and does what he desires.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

182. “By doing good we become good.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

184. “Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

185. “O love, if I regret the age when one savors you, it is not for the hour of pleasure, but for the one that follows it.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

186. “I had been brought up in a church which decides everything and permits no doubts, so that having rejected one article of faith I was forced to reject the rest.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

187. “The story of human nature is a fair romance. Am I to blame if it is not found elsewhere? I am trying to write the history of mankind. If my book is a romance, the fault lies with those who deprave mankind.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

188. “It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

189. “Jewish authors would never have invented either that style nor that morality; and the Gospel has marks of truth so great, so striking, so utterly inimitable, that the invention of it would be more astonishing than the hero.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

190. “Social man lives constantly outside himself.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

191. “On the other hand, nothing would have been so miserable as savage man, dazzled by enlightenment, tormented by passions, and reasoning about a state different from his own.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

192. “Men will argue more philosophically about the human heart; but women will read the heart of man better than they.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

193. “Liberty may be gained, but can never be recovered.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

194. “The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.” This is the fundamental problem of which the Social Contract provides the solution. The.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

195. “He who blushes is already guilty.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

196. “If, by chance, someone among those men of extraordinary talent is found who has firmness of soul and who refuses to yield to the genius of his age and to debase himself with childish works, woe unto him! He will die in poverty and oblivion.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

197. “Taste is, so to speak, the microscope of the judgment.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

198. “He who pretends to look upon death without fear, lies.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

199. “To make a man richer, give him more money of curb his desires.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

200. “All through life a man has need of a counsellor and guide.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau