Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Fame is but the breath of people, and that often unwholesome.

Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.

Childhood is the sleep of reason.

In the strict sense of the term, a true democracy has never existed, and never will exist.

To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. For he who renounces everything no indemnity is possible. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man's nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts.

Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone.

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.

A born king is a very rare being.

It is hard to prevent oneself from believing what one so keenly desires.

I feel an indescribable ecstasy and delirium in melting, as it were, into the system of being, in identifying myself with the whole of nature.

I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.

When something an affliction happens to you, you either let it defeat you, or you defeat it.

Most nations, as well as people are impossible only in their youth; they become incorrigible as they grow older.

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

We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.

I have always said and felt that true enjoyment can not be described.

To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn, and that which he will have the most need to know.

Force does not constitute right... obedience is due only to legitimate powers.

In Genoa, the word, libertas can be read on the front of prisons and on the fetters of galley-slaves. The application of this motto is fine and just.

Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.

If there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof is most complete. And with all that, who is there who believes in vampires?