JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU - QUOTES I have begun on a work which is without precedent, whose accomplishment will have no imitator.

I propose to set before my fellow-mortals a man in all the truth of nature; and this man shall be myself. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and W. Conyngham Mallory (Translator). The Confessions. 1782. I have studied mankind and know my heart; I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I at least claim originality, and whether Nature has acted rightly or wrongly in destroying the mold in which she cast me, can only be decided after I have been read. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and W. Conyngham Mallory (Translator). The Confessions. 1782. I was the unfortunate fruit of this return, being born ten months after, in a very weakly and infirm state; my birth cost my mother her life, and was the first of my misfortunes. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and W. Conyngham Mallory (Translator). The Confessions. 1782. I came into the world with so few signs of life, that they entertained but little hope of preserving me, with the seeds of a disorder that has gathered strength with years, and from which I am now relieved at intervals, only to suffer a different, though more intolerable evil. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and W. Conyngham Mallory (Translator). The Confessions. 1782. I soon acquired, by this dangerous custom, not only an extreme facility in reading and comprehending, but, for my age, a too intimate acquaintance with the passions. An infinity of sensations were familiar to me, without possessing any precise idea of the objects to which they related- I had conceived nothing- I had felt the whole. This confused succession of emotions did not retard the future efforts of my reason, though they added an extravagant, romantic notion of human life, which experience and reflection have never been able to eradicate. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and W. Conyngham Mallory (Translator). The Confessions. 1782. I knew nothing so delightful as to see every one content; not only with me, but all that concerned them. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and W. Conyngham Mallory (Translator). The Confessions. 1782. To fall at the feet of an imperious mistress, obey her mandates, or implore pardon, were for me the most exquisite enjoyments, and the more my blood was inflamed by the efforts of a lively imagination the more I acquired the appearance of a whining lover. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and W. Conyngham Mallory (Translator). The Confessions. 1782. In thus investigating the first traces of my sensible existence, I find elements, which, though seemingly incompatible, have united to produce a simple and uniform effect; while others, apparently the same, have, by the concurrence of certain circumstances, formed such different combinations, that it would never be imagined they had any affinity; who would believe, for example, that one of the most vigorous springs of my soul was tempered in the identical source from whence luxury and ease mingled with my constitution and circulated in my veins? Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and W. Conyngham Mallory (Translator). The Confessions. 1782. Thus I learned to covet, dissemble, lie, and, at length, to steal, a propensity I never felt the

least idea of before, though since that time I have never been able entirely to divest myself of it. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and W. Conyngham Mallory (Translator). The Confessions. 1782. God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil. He forces one soil to yield the products of another, one tree to bear another's fruit. He confuses and confounds time, place, and natural conditions. He mutilates his dog, his horse, and his slave. He destroys and defaces all things; he loves all that is deformed and monstrous; he will have nothing as nature made it, not even man himself, who must learn his paces like a saddle-horse, and be shaped to his master's taste like the trees in his garden. Yet things would be worse without this education, and mankind cannot be made by halves. Under existing conditions a man left to himself from birth would be more of a monster than the rest. Prejudice, authority, necessity, example, all the social conditions into which we are plunged, would stifle nature in him and put nothing in her place. She would be like a sapling chance sown in the midst of the highway, bent hither and thither and soon crushed by the passers-by. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and Barbara Foxley (Translator). Emile: Or, On Education. 1762. The earliest education is most important and it undoubtedly is woman's work. If the author of nature had meant to assign it to men he would have given them milk to feed the child. Address your treatises on education to the women, for not only are they able to watch over it more closely than men, not only is their influence always predominant in education, its success concerns them more nearly, for most widows are at the mercy of their children, who show them very plainly whether their education was good or bad. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and Barbara Foxley (Translator). Emile: Or, On Education. 1762. Plants are fashioned by cultivation, man by education. If a man were born tall and strong, his size and strength would be of no good to him till he had learnt to use them; they would even harm him by preventing others from coming to his aid. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and Barbara Foxley (Translator). Emile: Or, On Education. 1762. 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. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and Barbara Foxley (Translator). Emile: Or, On Education. 1762. Viewed as an art, the success of education is almost impossible, since the essential conditions of success are beyond our control. Our efforts may bring us within sight of the goal, but fortune must favour us if we are to reach it. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and Barbara Foxley (Translator). Emile: Or, On Education. 1762. We are born sensitive and from our birth onwards we are affected in various ways by our environment. As soon as we become conscious of our sensations we tend to seek or shun the things that cause them, at first because they are pleasant or unpleasant, then because they suit us or not, and at last because of judgments formed by means of the ideas of happiness and goodness which reason gives us. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and Barbara Foxley (Translator). Emile: Or, On Education. 1762. The natural man lives for himself; he is the unit, the whole, dependent only on himself and on his like. The citizen is but the numerator of a fraction, whose value depends on its denominator; his value depends upon the whole, that is, on the community. Good social institutions are those best fitted to make a man unnatural, to exchange his independence for

dependence, to merge the unit in the group, so that he no longer regards himself as one, but as a part of the whole, and is only conscious of the common life. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and Barbara Foxley (Translator). Emile: Or, On Education. 1762. To be something, to be himself, and always at one with himself, a man must act as he speaks, must know what course he ought to take, and must follow that course with vigour and persistence. When I meet this miracle it will be time enough to decide whether he is a man or a citizen, or how he contrives to be both. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and Barbara Foxley (Translator). Emile: Or, On Education. 1762. Our wisdom is slavish prejudice, our customs consist in control, constraint, compulsion. Civilised man is born and dies a slave. The infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the corpse is nailed down in his coffin. All his life long man is imprisoned by our institutions. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and Barbara Foxley (Translator). Emile: Or, On Education. 1762. Man is born to suffer; pain is the means of his preservation. His childhood is happy, knowing only pain of body. These bodily sufferings are much less cruel, much less painful, than other forms of suffering, and they rarely lead to self-destruction. It is not the twinges of gout which make a man kill himself, it is mental suffering that leads to despair. We pity the sufferings of childhood; we should pity ourselves; our worst sorrows are of our own making. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and Barbara Foxley (Translator). Emile: Or, On Education. 1762. Country women eat less meat and more vegetables than towns-women, and this vegetarian diet seems favourable rather than otherwise to themselves and their children. When they take nurslings from the upper classes they eat meat and broth with the idea that they will form better chyle and supply more milk. I do not hold with this at all, and experience is on my side, for we do not find children fed in this way less liable to colic and worms. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and Barbara Foxley (Translator). Emile: Or, On Education. 1762. Men are devoured by our towns. In a few generations the race dies out or becomes degenerate; it needs renewal, and it is always renewed from the country. Send your children to renew themselves, so to speak, send them to regain in the open fields the strength lost in the foul air of our crowded cities. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and Barbara Foxley (Translator). Emile: Or, On Education. 1762. FIRST MAXIM.Far from being too strong, children are not strong enough for all the claims of nature. Give them full use of such strength as they have; they will not abuse it. SECOND MAXIM.Help them and supply the experience and strength they lack whenever the need is of the body. THIRD MAXIM.In the help you give them confine yourself to what is really needful, without granting anything to caprice or unreason; for they will not be tormented by caprice if you do not call it into existence, seeing it is no part of nature. FOURTH MAXIMStudy carefully their speech and gestures, so that at an age when they are incapable of deceit you may discriminate between those desires which come from nature and those which spring from perversity. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and Barbara Foxley (Translator). Emile: Or, On Education. 1762. Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? That question I think I can answer.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and G.D.H. Cole (Translator). The Social Contract and Discourses. 1762. The most ancient of all societies, and the only one that is natural, is the family: and even so the children remain attached to the father only so long as they need him for their preservation. As soon as this need ceases, the natural bond is dissolved. The children, released from the obedience they owed to the father, and the father, released from the care he owed his children, return equally to independence. If they remain united, they continue so no longer naturally, but voluntarily; and the family itself is then maintained only by convention. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and G.D.H. Cole (Translator). The Social Contract and Discourses. 1762. The family then may be called the first model of political societies: the ruler corresponds to the father, and the people to the children; and all, being born free and equal, alienate their liberty only for their own advantage. The whole difference is that, in the family, the love of the father for his children repays him for the care he takes of them, while, in the State, the pleasure of commanding takes the place of the love which the chief cannot have for the peoples under him. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and G.D.H. Cole (Translator). The Social Contract and Discourses. 1762. The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty. Hence the right of the strongest, which, though to all seeming meant ironically, is really laid down as a fundamental principle. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and G.D.H. Cole (Translator). The Social Contract and Discourses. 1762. Since no man has a natural authority over his fellow, and force creates no right, we must conclude that conventions form the basis of all legitimate authority among men. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and G.D.H. Cole (Translator). The Social Contract and Discourses. 1762. I suppose men to have reached the point at which the obstacles in the way of their preservation in the state of nature show their power of resistance to be greater than the resources at the disposal of each individual for his maintenance in that state. That primitive condition can then subsist no longer; and the human race would perish unless it changed its manner of existence. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and G.D.H. Cole (Translator). The Social Contract and Discourses. 1762. The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had formerly lacked. Then only, when the voice of duty takes the place of physical impulses and right of appetite, does man, who so far had considered only himself, find that he is forced to act on different principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and G.D.H. Cole (Translator). The Social Contract and Discourses. 1762. I hold then that Sovereignty, being nothing less than the exercise of the general will, can

never be alienated, and that the Sovereign, who is no less than a collective being, cannot be represented except by himself: the power indeed may be transmitted, but not the will. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and G.D.H. Cole (Translator). The Social Contract and Discourses. 1762. Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is; the people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived, and on such occasions only does it seem to will what is bad. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and G.D.H. Cole (Translator). The Social Contract and Discourses. 1762. Every man has a right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and G.D.H. Cole (Translator). The Social Contract and Discourses. 1762. What is well and in conformity with order is so by the nature of things and independently of human conventions. All justice comes from God, who is its sole source; but if we knew how to receive so high an inspiration, we should need neither government nor laws. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and G.D.H. Cole (Translator). The Social Contract and Discourses. 1762. A thousand nations have achieved earthly greatness, that could never have endured good laws; even such as could have endured them could have done so only for a very brief period of their long history. Most peoples, like most men, are docile only in youth; as they grow old they become incorrigible. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and G.D.H. Cole (Translator). The Social Contract and Discourses. 1762. Youth is not infancy. There is for nations, as for men, a period of youth, or, shall we say, maturity, before which they should not be made subject to laws; but the maturity of a people is not always easily recognisable, and, if it is anticipated, the work is spoilt. One people is amenable to discipline from the beginning; another, not after ten centuries. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and G.D.H. Cole (Translator). The Social Contract and Discourses. 1762. What then is government? An intermediate body set up between the subjects and the Sovereign, to secure their mutual correspondence, charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance of liberty, both civil and political. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and G.D.H. Cole (Translator). The Social Contract and Discourses. 1762. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a simple government. An isolated ruler must have subordinate magistrates; a popular government must have a head. There is therefore, in the distribution of the executive power, always a gradation from the greater to the lesser number, with the difference that sometimes the greater number is dependent on the smaller, and sometimes the smaller on the greater. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and G.D.H. Cole (Translator). The Social Contract and Discourses. 1762. There are two general courses by which government degenerates: i. e. when it undergoes

contraction, or when the State is dissolved. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and G.D.H. Cole (Translator). The Social Contract and Discourses. 1762. Where right and liberty are everything, disadvantages count for nothing. Among this wise people everything was given its just value, its lictors were allowed to do what its tribunes would never have dared to attempt; for it had no fear that its lictors would try to represent it. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and G.D.H. Cole (Translator). The Social Contract and Discourses. 1762.