Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseauwas a Francophone Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of the 18th century. His political philosophy influenced the Enlightenment in France and across Europe, as well as aspects of the French Revolution and the overall development of modern political and educational thought...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth28 June 1712
CityGeneva, Switzerland
CountryFrance
use definitions would-be
Definitions would be good things if we did not use words to make them.
greatness men use
Great men never make bad use of their superiority. They see it and feel it and are not less modest. The more they have, the more they know their own deficiencies.
men mind use
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.
technology tools use
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.
believe people use
The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during election of members of parliament; as soon as the members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing. In the brief moment of its freedom, the English people makes such a use of that freedom that it deserves to lose it.
duty obedience strength strongest transforms unless
The strongest is never strong enough always to be master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty
child endurance endure learn lesson
Endurance and to be able to endure is the first lesson a child should learn because it's the one they will most need to know.
life man order risk save
Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to save it.
body conscience passions voice
Conscience is the voice of the soul; the passions are the voice of the body
acquire free recovered remember
Free people, remember this maxim: We may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.
believe likely longer people
Most people believe that the longer you let these things go, the more likely you are to have something go wrong.
american-journalist hate talk teach
I hate books; they only teach us to talk about what we don't know.
faithful integrity performance promise
The person who is slowest in making a promise is most faithful in its performance.
evils others ourselves pity
We pity in others only those evils which we have ourselves experienced