Quote

Too much apparatus, designed to guide us in experiments and to supplement the exactness of our senses, makes us neglect to use those senses...The more ingenious our apparatus, the coarser and more unskillful are our senses. We surround ourselves with tools and fail to use those which nature has provided every one of us.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Age: 66 †
Born: 1712
Born: June 28
Died: 1778
Died: July 2
Autobiographer
Botanist
Choreographer
Composer
Correspondent
Encyclopédistes
Essayist
Literary
Music Critic
Music Theorist
Musicologist
Genève
J. J. Rousseau
Rousseau
Jean Jaques Rousseau
Jean Jeacques Rousseau
John James Rousseau
Johann Jacob Rousseau
Juan Jacobo Rousseau
Jan Jakub Rouseau
Gian Giacomo Rousseau
Lu-so
G. G. Rousseau
Zhan Zhak Russo
Citizen of Geneva
Citoyen de Genève
Jean Jacques
Technology
Guide
Supplement
Use
Designed
Exactness
Makes
Guides
Supplements
Nature
Experiments
Apparatus
Much
Senses
Ingenious
Every
Fail
Provided
Tools
Surround
Unskillful
Failing
Neglect
Coarser

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Women, in general, are not attracted to art at all, nor knowledge, and not at all to genius.
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I may be no better, but at least I am different.
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Sovereigns always see with pleasure a taste for the arts of amusement and superfluity, which do not result in the exportation of bullion, increase among their subjects. They very well know that, besides nourishing that littleness of mind which is proper to slavery, the increase of artificial wants only binds so many more chains upon the people.
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In the strict sense of the term, a true democracy has never existed, and never will exist.
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I say to myself: Who are you to measure infinite power?
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He who pretends to look on death without fear lies. All men are afraid of dying, this is the great law of sentient beings, without which the entire human species would soon be destroyed.
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In the North the first words are, Help me in the South, Love me.
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The man is best served who has no occasion to put the hands of others at the end of his own arms.
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Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given to us by education.
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It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.
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Equality is deemed by many a mere speculative chimera, which can never be reduced to practice. But if the abuse is inevitable, does it follow that we ought not to try at least to mitigate it? It is precisely because the force of things tends always to destroy equality that the force of the legislature must always tend to maintain it.
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Frequent punishments are always a sign of weakness or laziness on the part of a government.
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The social compact sets up among the citizens as equality of such kind, that they all bind themselves to observe the same conditions and should therefore all enjoy the same rights.
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If I am part of a group of 100 people, do 99 people have the right to sentence me to death, just because they are majority?
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What, then, is the government? An intermediary body established between the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual communication, and charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance of freedom, civil as well as political.
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Girls must be thwarted early in life.
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Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.
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The taste for splendor is hardly ever combined in the same souls with the taste for the honorable.
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