"I hate books; they only teach people to talk about what they don't understand."
Read quote
8 likes
Quote collection
Jean-Jacques Rousseau quotes (page 11 of 20)
388 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The French, for example, are a contemptible nation."
Read quote
8 likes
"The English people think they are free; they are greatly deceived; they are free only during the election of members of Parliament."
Read quote
8 likes
"I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself."
Read quote
8 likes
"We do not know what really good or bad fortune is."
Read quote
8 likes
"The tone of good conversation is brilliant and natural; it is neither tedious nor frivolous; it is instructive without pedantry, gay without tumultuousness, polished without affectation, gallant without insipidity, waggish without equivocation."
Read quote
8 likes
"Or, rather, let us be more simple and less vain."
Read quote
8 likes
"The bigger a state becomes the more liberty diminishes."
Read quote
8 likes
"Supreme happiness consists in self-content."
Read quote
7 likes
"It is in man's heart that the life of nature's spectacle exists; to see it, one must feel it."
Read quote
7 likes
"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."
Read quote
7 likes
"Cities are the abyss of the human species."
Read quote
7 likes
"The English are predisposed to pride, the French to vanity."
Read quote
7 likes
"It is not possible for minds degraded by a host of trivial concerns to ever rise to anything great."
Read quote
7 likes
"Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it."
Read quote
7 likes
"To make a man richer, give him more money of curb his desires."
Read quote
7 likes
"[When anything happens, we interpret it as good or bad, but...] We do not know what is really good or bad fortune. [Only the future can decide. For example, what appears to be bad today may in fact lead us to a greater good tomorrow and by the very act of thinking and planning in that positive way, we can help make that good future come true.]"
Read quote
7 likes
"At Genoa, the word Liberty may be read over the front of the prisons and on the chains of the galley-slaves. This application of the device is good and just. It is indeed only malefactors of all estates who prevent the citizen from being free. In the country in which all such men were in the galleys, the most perfect liberty would be enjoyed."
Read quote
7 likes
"There is a period in life when we go backwards as we advance."
Read quote
7 likes
"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."
Read quote
7 likes