Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes on Knowledge
Rousseau's Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (1750) — his prize-winning entry in the Dijon Academy's competition — opens the Rousseauean critique of Enlightenment progress with the unwelcome answer that the revival of the sciences and the arts has not contributed to the purification of mores but to their corruption. The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755) extends the critique to the broader institutions of civilization, locating the origin of the moral, political, and intellectual ills of contemporary Europe in the historical movement away from a hypothetical natural condition. The Emile and the Social Contract supply the constructive alternative — an education and a politics designed to recover what civilization has corrupted within the conditions civilization has nevertheless made permanent.
Quotes
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Attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
“Plants are shaped by cultivation and men by education.”
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Attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
“People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.”
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Attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
“The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.”
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“Let's go dance under the elms: Step lively, young lassies. Let's go dance under the elms: Gallants, take up your pipes.”
Le devin du village (1752) -
“Le devin du village (1752)”
Let's go dance under the elms: Step lively, young lassies. Let's go dance under the elms: Gallants, take up your pipes. -
“L'accent est l'âme du discours.”
Accent is the soul of language ; it gives to it both feeling and truth. | English translation as quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, Both Ancient and Modern (1908) by Tryon Edwards , p. 2. -
“An honest man nearly always thinks justly.”
As quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, Both Ancient and Modern (1908) by Tryon Edwards , p. 277.