Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

A child who passes through many hands in turn, can never be well brought up. At every change he makes a secret comparison, which continually tends to lessen his respect for those who control him, and with it their authority over him. If once he thinks there are grown-up people with no more sense than children the authority of age is destroyed and his education is ruined.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

A feeble body makes a feeble mind. I do not know what doctors cure us of, but I know this: they infect us with very deadly diseases, cowardice, timidity, credulity, the fear of death. What matter if they make the dead walk, we have no need of corpses; they fail to give us men, and it is men we need.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

A feeble body weakens the mind.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Ah,' thought the king sadly, shrugging his shoulders, "I see clearly that if one has a crazy wife, one cannot avoid being a fool.'("Queen Fantasize")

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

All that time is lost which might be better employed.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Among the many shortcuts to science, we badly need someone to teach us the art of learning with difficulty.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

...an animal, at the end of a few months, is what it will be all its life; and its species, at the end of a thousand years, is what it was in the first of those thousand years. Why is man alone subject to becoming an imbecile?

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Ancient politicians talked incessantly about morality and virtue; our politicians talk only about business and money. One will tell you that in a particular country a man is worth the sum he could be sold for in Algiers; another, by following this calculation, will find countries where a man is worth nothing, and others where he is worth less than nothing. They assess men like herds of livestock. According to them, a man has no value to the State apart from what he consumes in it. Thus, one Sybarite would have been worth at least thirty Lacedaemonians. Would someone therefore hazard a guess which of these two republics, Sparta or Saris, was overthrown by a handful of peasants and which one made Asia tremble?

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau