Top 400 Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “The decent man and the lover holds back even when he could obtain what he wishes. To win this silent consent is to make use of all the violence permitted in love. To read it in the eyes, to see it in the ways in spite of the mouth’s denial, that is the art of he who knows how to love. If he then completes his happiness, he is not brutal, he is decent. He does not insult chasteness; he respects it; he serves it.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

302. “Behold the works of our philosophers; with all their pompous diction, how mean and contemptible they are by comparison with the Scriptures! Is it possible that a book at once so simple and sublime should be merely the work of man?”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

303. “The French, for example, are a contemptible nation.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

304. “Doubt with regard to what we ought to know is a condition too violent for the human mind; it cannot long be endured; in spite of itself the mind decides one way or another, and it prefers to be deceived rather than to believe nothing.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

305. “The desire to be better understood has been extinguished from my heart.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

306. “How many famous and high-spirited heroes have lived a day too long?”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

307. “Take from the philosopher the pleasure of being heard and his desire for knowledge ceases.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

308. “A person who can break wind is not dead.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

309. “I do not know is a phrase which becomes us.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

310. “One advantage resulting from good actions is that they elevate the soul to a disposition of attempting still better; for such is human weakness, that we must place among our good deeds an abstinence from those crimes we are tempted to commit.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

311. “We may add that frequent punishments are always a sign of weakness or remissness on the part of the government. There is not a single ill-doer who could not be turned to some good. The State has no right to put to death, even for the sake of making an example, any one whom it can leave alive without danger.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

312. “Those who distinguish civil from theological intolerance are, to my mind, mistaken.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

313. “It is not our criminal actions that require courage to confess, but those which are ridiculous and foolish.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

314. “Presence of mind, penetration, fine observation, are the sciences of women; ability to avail themselves of these is their talent.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

315. “A citizen should render to the state all the services he can as soon as the sovereign demands them.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

316. “Government in its infancy had no regular and permanent form. For want of a sufficient fund of philosophy and experience, men could see no further than the present inconveniences, and never thought of providing remedies for future ones, but in proportion as they arose.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

317. “We cannot teach children the danger of lying to men without feeling as men, the greater danger of lying to children.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

318. “The man is best served who has no occasion to put the hands of others at the end of his own arms.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

319. “The good man can be proud of his virtue because it is his. But of what is the intelligent man proud?”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

320. “Whether the woman shares the man’s passion or not, whether she is willing or unwilling to satisfy it, she always repulses him and defends herself, though not always with the same vigour, and therefore not always with the same success.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

321. “The taste for splendor is hardly ever combined in the same souls with the taste for the honorable.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

322. “If I had remained free, obscure, and alone placed in the situation Nature designed me for, I should have done nothing but what was right, for my heart bears not the feeds of any mischievous passion. Had I been invisible and powerful as the Almighty, I should have been benevolent and good like him: it is power and freedom that make good men, weakness and slavery never made any but wicked ones.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

323. “The wisest writers devote themselves to what a man ought to know, without asking what a child is capable of learning. They are always looking for the man in the child, without considering what he is before he becomes a man.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

324. “It is hard to prevent oneself from believing what one so keenly desires, and who can doubt that the interest we have in admitting or denying the reality of the Judgement to come determines the faith of most men in accordance with their hopes and fears.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

325. “Base souls have no faith in great individuals.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

326. “It is a great evil for a Chief of a nation to be born the enemy of the freedom whose defender he should be.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

327. “Suffer, die, or get better; but whatever you do, live while you are alive.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

328. “The strength of the people is effective only if it is concentrated; it evaporates and is lost when it is dispersed, just as gunpowder scattered on the ground ignites only grain by grain.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

329. “The mechanism she employs is much more powerful than ours, for all her levers move the human heart.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

330. “I only see clearly what I remember.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

331. “To abstain that we may enjoy is the epicurianism of reason.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

332. “To decide that the son of a slave is born a slave is to decide that he is not born a man.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

333. “The spectacle of nature, by growing quite familiar to him, becomes at last equally indifferent. It is constantly the same order, constantly the same revolutions; he has not sense enough to feel surprise at the sight of the greatest wonders; and it is not in his mind we must look for that philosophy, which man must have to know how to observe once, what he has every day seen.” Jean Jacques Rousseau, On the Inequality among Mankind, Ch. 1, 20.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

334. “Self-esteem is the strongest incentive to elevated souls: self-pride, fertile in illusions, often disguises itself, and is mistaken for the former; but when once the fraud is discovered, the danger ceases; for though it is difficult to eradicate it entirely, it may easily be kept in subjection.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

335. “Men, despite all their ethics, would never be anything more than monsters if nature had not given them pity to bolster their reason.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

336. “What good is it looking for our happiness in the opinion of others if we can find it in ourselves?”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

337. “There is no folly of which a man who is not a fool cannot get rid except vanity; of this nothing cures a man except experience of its bad consequences, if indeed anything can cure it.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

338. “A taste for ostentation is rarely associated in the same souls with a taste for honesty.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

339. “I loved too sincerely, too completely, I venture to say, to be able to be happy easily.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

340. “The wise man observes the public disorder he cannot prevent; he observes it, and reveals by his sad countenance the grief it causes him; but as for individual disorders, he opposes them or averts his eyes, lest his presence be taken for approval.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

341. “One loses all the time which he might employ to better purpose.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

342. “Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

343. “The bounds of human possibility are not as confining as we think they are; they are made to seem to be tight by our weaknesses, our vices, our prejudices that confine them.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

344. “The science of government is only a science of combinations, of applications, and of exceptions, according to times, places and circumstances.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

345. “I believed in childhood by authority, in youth by sentiment, in my mature years by reason; now I believe because I have always believed.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

346. “It frequently happens that a villainous action does not torment us the instant we commit it, but on recollection, and sometimes even after a number of years have elapsed, for the remembrance of crimes is not to be extinguished.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

347. “To exist is to feel; our feeling is undoubtedly earlier than our intelligence, and we had feelings before we had ideas.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

348. “Teach your scholar to observe the phenomena of nature; you will soon rouse his curiosity, but if you would have it grow, do not be in too great a hurry to satisfy this curiosity. Put the problems before him and let him solve them himself. Let him know nothing because you have told him, but because he has learnt it for himself. Let him not be taught science, let him discover it. If ever you substitute authority for reason he will cease to reason; he will be a mere plaything of other people’s thoughts.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

349. “There are two things to be considered with regard to any scheme. In the first place, Is it good in itself? In the second, Can it be easily put into practice?”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

350. “Gambling is only the resource of those who do not know what to do with themselves.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau