Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Patience patience quotes is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.

The infant, on opening his eyes, ought to see his country, and to the hour of his death never lose sight of it.

What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?

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.

Those people who treat politics and morality separately will never understand either of them.

As evening approached, I came down from the heights of the island, and I liked then to go and sit on the shingle in some secluded spot by the lake; there the noise of the waves and the movement of the water, taking hold of my senses and driving all other agitation from my soul, would plunge me into delicious reverie in which night often stole upon me unawares.

To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life.

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.

Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil.

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.

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.

An intelligent being, is the active principle of all things. One must have renounced all common sense to doubt it, and it is a waste of time to try to prove such self evident truth.

Teach by doing whenever you can, and only fall back upon words when doing it is out of the question.

The body politic, as well as the human body, begins to die as soon as it is born, and carries itself the causes of its destruction.

The bigger a state becomes the more liberty diminishes.

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.

There is no subjection so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom.

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

We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man's estate, is the gift of education.

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.

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.