up:: Education, Philosophy
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (UK: , US: French: [ʒɑ̃ ʒak ʁuso]; 28 June 1712 – 2 July 1778) was a Genevan philosopher (philosophe), writer, and composer. His political philosophy influenced the progress of the Age of Enlightenment throughout Europe, as well as aspects of the French Revolution and the development of modern political, economic, and educational thought.His Discourse on Inequality, which argues that private property is the source of inequality, and The Social Contract, which outlines the basis for a legitimate political order, are cornerstones in modern political and social thought. Rousseau’s sentimental novel Julie, or the New Heloise (1761) was important to the development of preromanticism and romanticism in fiction. His Emile, or On Education (1762) is an educational treatise on the place of the individual in society. Rousseau’s autobiographical writings—the posthumously published Confessions (completed in 1770), which initiated the modern autobiography, and the unfinished Reveries of the Solitary Walker (composed 1776–1778)—exemplified the late 18th-century “Age of Sensibility”, and featured an increased focus on subjectivity and introspection that later characterized modern writing.
Quotes
- “I know the feelings of my heart, and I know men. I am not made like any of those I have seen; I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different. Whether Nature has acted rightly or wrongly in destroying the mould in which she cast me, can only be decided after I have been read.” ― Jean Jacques Rousseau, Confessions
- “It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau , Confessions
- “What wisdom can you find greater than kindness.” ― Jean Jacques Rousseau
- “Why should we build our happiness on the opinons of others, when we can find it in our own hearts?” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses
- “To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.” ― Jean Jacques Rosseau
- “Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it. ” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- “Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.” ― Rousseau
- “Every man having been born free and master of himself, no one else may under any pretext whatever subject him without his consent. To assert that the son of a slave is born a slave is to assert that he is not born a man.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
- “I perceive God everywhere in His works. I sense Him in me; I see Him all around me.” ― Rousseau Jean - Jacques
- “There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions
- “Teach your scholar to observe the phenomena of nature; you will soon rouse his curiosity, but if you would have it grow, do not be in too great a hurry to satisfy this curiosity. Put the problems before him and let him solve them himself. Let him know nothing because you have told him, but because he has learnt it for himself. Let him not be taught science, let him discover it. If ever you substitute authority for reason he will cease to reason; he will be a mere plaything of other people’s thoughts.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- “It is as if my heart and my brain did not belong to the same person. Feelings come quicker than lightning and fill my soul, but they bring me no illumination; they burn me and dazzle me.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions
- “The extreme inequality of our ways of life, the excess of idleness among some and the excess of toil among others, the ease of stimulating and gratifying our appetites and our senses, the over-elaborate foods of the rich, which inflame and overwhelm them with indigestion, the bad food of the poor, which they often go without altogether, so hat they over-eat greedily when they have the opportunity; those late nights, excesses of all kinds, immoderate transports of every passion, fatigue, exhaustion of mind, the innumerable sorrows and anxieties that people in all classes suffer, and by which the human soul is constantly tormented: these are the fatal proofs that most of our ills are of our own making, and that we might have avoided nearly all of them if only we had adhered to the simple, unchanging and solitary way of life that nature ordained for us. ” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
- “If there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- “It is easier to conquer than to administer. With enough leverage, a finger could overturn the world; but to support the world, one must have the shoulders of Hercules.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
- “All wickedness comes from weakness. The child is wicked only because he is weak. Make him strong; he will be good. He who could do everything would never do harm.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education
- “I believed that I was approaching the end of my days without having tasted to the full any of the pleasures for which my heart thirsted…without having ever tasted that passion which, through lack of an object, was always suppressed….The impossibility of attaining the real persons precipitated me into the land of chimeras; and seeing nothing that existed worthy of my exalted feelings, I fostered them in an ideal world which my creative imagination soon peopled with beings after my own heart.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions
- “The indolence I love is not that of a lazy fellow who sits with his arms across in total inaction, and thinks no more than he acts, but that of a child which is incessantly in motion doing nothing, and that of a dotard who wanders from his subject. I love to amuse myself with trifles, by beginning a hundred things and never finishing one of them, by going or coming as I take either into my head, by changing my project at every instant, by following a fly through all its windings, in wishing to overturn a rock to see what is under it, by undertaking with ardor the work of ten years, and abandoning it without regret at the end of ten minutes; finally, in musing from morning until night without order or coherence, and in following in everything the caprice of a moment.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confession
- “I have never believed that man’s freedom consisted in doing what he wants, but rather in never doing what he does not want to do.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- “I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education
- “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality