Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to save time, but to squander it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

God made me and broke the mold.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Happiness: a good bank account, a good cook, and a good digestion.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

He who is most slow in making a promise is the most faithful in performance of it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about what we don't know.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I have resolved on an enterprise that has no precedent and will have no imitator. I want to set before my fellow human beings a man in every way true to nature; and that man will be myself.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I long remained a child, and I am still one in many respects.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I may be no better, but at least I am different.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I may not be better than other people, but at least I'm different.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I only see clearly what I remember.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Insults are the arguments employed by those who are in the wrong.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

No man has any natural authority over his fellow men.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

No true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

O love, if I regret the age when one savors you, it is not for the hour of pleasure, but for the one that follows it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau