Jean Jacques Rousseau Love Quotes & Sayings

No one cares for reality, everyone stakes his essence on illusion. Slaves and dupes of their self-love, men live not in order to live but to make other believe they have lived! — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

It is difficult for an education in which the heart is involved to remain forever lost. — 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

I love idleness. I love to busy myself about trifles, to begin a hundred things and not finish one of them, to come and go as my fancy bids me, to change my plan every moment, to follow a fly in all its circlings, to try and uproot a rock to see what is underneath, eagerly to begin a ten-years' task to give it up after ten minutes: in short, to fritter away the whole day inconsequentially and incoherently, and to follow nothing but the whim of the moment. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I'm always curious how we sometimes have a different point of view when it comes to justice. And that's why people root for 'Dexter.' — Erik King

So long as government and law provide for the security and well-being of men in their common life, the arts, literature and the sciences, less despotic though perhaps more powerful, fling garlands of flowers over the chains which weight them down. They stifle in men's breasts that sense of original liberty, for which they seem to have been born; cause them to love their own slavery, and so make of them what is called a civilized people. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Shut off the internal bashing. — Melody Carlson

Days of absence, sad and dreary,
Clothed in sorrow's dark array, -
Days of absence, I am weary;
She I love is far away.
Poetic Verse by — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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 Rousseau

Love, known to the person by whom it is inspired, becomes more bearable. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Leave those vain moralists, my friend, and return to the depth of your soul: that is where you will always rediscover the source of the sacred fire which so often inflamed us with love of the sublime virtues; that is where you will see the eternal image of true beauty, the contemplation of which inspires us with a holy enthusiasm. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life; ...
'So careful of the type', but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, 'A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go' ...
Man, her last work, who seemed so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law-
Tho' Nature red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shrieked against his creed ... — Alfred Lord Tennyson

My love for imaginary objects and my facility in lending myself to them ended by disillusioning me with everything around me, and determined that love of solitude which I have retained ever since that time. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The mind has its needs, just as the body does. The latter are the
foundations of society; from the former emerge the pleasures of
society. While government and laws take care of the security
and the well being of men in groups, the sciences, letters, and
the arts, less despotic and perhaps more powerful, spread
garlands of flowers over the iron chains which weigh men
down, snuffing out in them the feeling of that original liberty for
which they appear to have been born, and make them love their
slavery by turning them into what are called civilized people. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Love childhood, indulge its sports, its pleasures, its delightful instincts. Who has not sometimes regretted that age when laughter was ever on the lips, and when the heart was ever at peace? — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

She was dull, unattractive, couldn't tell the time, count money or tie her own shoe laces ... But I loved her — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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

And in that narrow cockpit I wept, as I shall never weep again, when I felt the concrete brush against his wheels and, with a great sweep of the wrist, dropped him on the ground like a cut flower. As always, I carefully cleared the engine, turned off all the switches one by one, removed the straps, the wires and the tubes which tied me to him, like a child to his mother. And when my waiting pilots and my mechanics saw my downcast eyes and my shaking shoulders, they understood and returned to the dispersal in silence. — Pierre Clostermann

Stay out of the gentlemen's clubs. Get a lot of rest. Just have fun and relax and stay focused. — Shaquille O'Neal

There's a place down the street; Seven Xs. What does that mean? Maybe it's ... girls without skin. — Tom Waits

Hatred, as well as love, renders its votaries credulous. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Want of principle is power. Truth and honesty set a limit to our efforts, which impudence and hypocrisy easily overleap. — William Hazlitt

Your first duty is to be humane. Love childhood. Look with friendly eyes on its games, its pleasures, its amiable dispositions. Which of you does not sometimes look back regretfully on the age when laughter was ever on the lips and the heart free of care? Why steal from the little innocents the enjoyment of a time that passes all too quickly? — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

To write a love letter, you have to start, without knowing, what you want to say, and end, without knowing what you have said. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Your mind is well-spring of life. — Lailah Gifty Akita

In the North the first words are, Help me; in the South, Love me. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Happy is said to be the family which can eat onions together. They are, for the time being, separate, from the world, and have a harmony of aspiration. — Charles Dudley Warner

The decent man and the lover holds back even when he could obtain what he wishes. To win this silent consent is to make use of all the violence permitted in love. To read it in the eyes, to see it in the ways in spite of the mouth's denial, that is the art of he who knows how to love. If he then completes his happiness, he is not brutal, he is decent. He does not insult chasteness; he respects it; he serves it. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Self-love is an instrument useful but dangerous; it often wounds the hand which makes use of it, and seldom does good without doing harm. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Political writers argue in regard to the love of liberty with the same philosophy that philosophers do in regard to the state of nature; by the things they see they judge of things very different which they have never seen, and they attribute to men a natural inclination to slavery, on account of the patience with which the slaves within their notice carry the yoke; not reflecting that it is with liberty as with innocence and virtue, the value of which is not known but by those who possess them, though the relish for them is lost with the things themselves. I know the charms of your country, said Brasidas to a satrap who was comparing the life of the Spartans with that of the Persepolites; but you can not know the pleasures of mine. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Now it is easy to perceive that the moral part of love is a factitious sentiment, engendered by society, and cried up by the women with great care and address in order to establish their empire, and secure command to that sex which ought to obey. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I've been a Republican since age 13, when we got our first television set, and I saw the Republican National Convention on television. And President Eisenhower was talking about personal responsibility, about opening the door for opportunity and that people could really take care of themselves without a lot of government intrusions. — Lionel Sosa