Quotes by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

• What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?
• He who is most slow in making a promise is the most faithful in performance of it.
• I long remained a child, and I am still one in many respects.
• I have resolved on an enterprise that has no precedent and will have no imitator. I want to set before my fellow human beings a man in every way true to nature; and that man will be myself.
• Happiness: a good bank account, a good cook, and a good digestion.
• God made me and broke the mold.
• We are born, so to speak, twice over; born into existence, and born into life; born a human being, and born a man.
• I may be no better, but at least I am different.
• 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.
• Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.
• Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?
• I may not be better than other people, but at least I'm different.
• I only see clearly what I remember.
• 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.
• Whoever blushes is already guilty; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.
• It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.
• Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.
• No man has any natural authority over his fellow men.
• 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.
• 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.
• Religious persecutors are not believers, they are rascals.
• Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.
• Insults are the arguments employed by those who are in the wrong.