Jean Jacques Rousseau Inspirational Quotes (225)

I loved too sincerely, too completely, I venture to say, to be able to be happy easily.

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.

My bad head cannot adjust itself to the way things are.... If I want to depict spring, it has to be in wintertime if I want to describe a beautiful landscape, I must be enclosed within walls and I have said a hundred times that if I were put in the Bastille, there I would paint a picture of liberty.

The mechanism she employs is much more powerful than ours, for all her levers move the human heart.

There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character.

We can never put ourselves in the shoes of children we cannot fathom their thoughts, we lend them ours and always following ourown reasoning, we stuff their heads with extravagance and error.

For it is in our nature to endure patiently the decrees of fate, but not the ill-will of others.

Plants are shaped by cultivation and men by education. .. We are born weak, we need strength we are born totally unprovided, we need aid we are born stupid, we need judgment. Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given us by education.

No one is happy unless he respects himself.