However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

How many famous and high-spirited heroes have lived a day too long?

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

How much more reasonable is it to say with the sage Plato, that the perfect happiness of a state consists in the subjects obeying their prince, the prince obeying the laws, and the laws being equitable and always directed to the good of the public?

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I am not worried about pleasing clever minds or fashionable people. In every period there will be men fated to be governed by the opinions of their century, their country, and their society. For that very reason, a freethinker or philosopher today would have been nothing but a fanatic at the time of the League.* One must not write for such readers, if one wishes to live beyond one’s own age.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I ask: which of the two, civil or natural life, is more likely to become insufferable to those who live it? We see about us practically no people who do not complain about their existence; many even deprive themselves of it to the extent they are able, and the combination of divine and human laws is hardly enough to stop this disorder.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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

If the life and death of Socrates were those of a sage the life and death of Jesus were those of a God.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

If there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof is most complete. And with all that, who is there who believes in vampires?

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

If there were a nation of Gods, it would govern itself democratically. A government so perfect is not suited to men.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau