"The empire of woman is an empire of softness, of address, of complacency. Her commands are caresses, her menaces are tears."
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau quotes (page 10 of 20)
388 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Quit thy childhood, my friend, and wake up!"
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"Innocence is ashamed of nothing."
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"Never did I think so much, exist so much, be myself so much as in the journeys I have made alone and on foot. Walking has something about it which animates and enlivens my ideas. I can hardly think while I am still; my body must be in motion to move my mind."
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"The man who meditates is a depraved animal."
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"Everything made by man may be destroyed by man; there are no ineffaceable characters except those engraved by nature; and nature makes neither princes nor rich men nor great lords."
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"Teach him to live rather than to avoid death: life is not breath, but action, the use of our senses, our mind, our faculties, every part of ourselves which makes us conscious of our being. Life consists less in length of days than in the keen sense of living. A man maybe buried at a hundred and may never have lived at all. He would have fared better had he died young."
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"Our greatest evils flow from ourselves."
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"Everything is in constant flux on this earth. Nothing keeps the same unchanging shape, and our affections, being attached to things outside us, necessarily change and pass away as they do. Always out ahead of us or lagging behind, they recall a past which is gone or anticipate a future which may never come into being; there is nothing solid there for the heart to attach itself to. Thus our earthly joys are almost without exception the creatures of a moment."
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"There exists one book, which, to my taste, furnishes the happiest treatise of natural education. What then is this marvelous book? Is it Aristotle? Is it Pliny, is it Buffon? No-it is Robinson Crusoe."
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"Presence of mind, penetration, fine observation, are the sciences of women; ability to avail themselves of these is their talent."
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"Two things, almost incompatible, are united in me in a manner which I am unable to understand: a very ardent temperament, lively and tumultuous passions, and, at the same time, slowly developed and confused ideas, which never present themselves until it is too late. One might say that my heart and my mind do not belong to the same person."
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"Ought to have a universal compulsory force to move and arrange each part in the manner best suited to the whole. Just as nature gives each man an absolute power over all his members, the social compact gives the body politic an absolute power over all its members." "We grant that each person alienates, by the social compact, only that portion of his power, his goods, and liberty whose use is of consequence to the community; but we must also grant that only the sovereign is the judge of what is of consequence."
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"There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character."
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"Smell is the sense of memory and desire."
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"Women speak at an earlier age, more easily, and more agreeably than men; they are accused also of speaking more; this is as it should be, and I willingly change the reproach into a eulogy."
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"The French painter Rousseau was once asked why he put a naked woman on a red sofa in the middle of his jungle pictures. He answered, 'I needed a bit of red there.'"
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"No true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another."
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"I believed that I was approaching the end of my days without having tasted to the full any of the pleasures for which my heart thirsted...without having ever tasted that passion which, through lack of an object, was always suppressed. ...The impossibility of attaining the real persons precipitated me into the land of chimeras; and seeing nothing that existed worthy of my exalted feelings, I fostered them in an ideal world which my creative imagination soon peopled with beings after my own heart."
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"The most absolute authority is that which penetrates into a man's innermost being and concerns itself no less with his will than with his actions."
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