Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

A feeble body weakens the mind.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Insults are the arguments employed by those who are in the wrong.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I have always said and felt that true enjoyment can not be described.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

We are born, so to speak, twice over; born into existence, and born into life; born a human being, and born a man.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I may be no better, but at least I am different.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

It is unnatural for a majority to rule, for a majority can seldom be organized and united for specific action, and a minority can.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Every man has a right to risk his own life for the preservation of it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The English think they are free. They are free only during the election of members of parliament.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

We should not teach children the sciences; but give them a taste for them.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau