Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes

It's true that no child is born knowing there's an evil thing. You learn what is ugly.

'Good Times' is a story about the loss of innocence, how adults are responsible for their actions but children aren't.

The knowledge that we have about what it is to be human that we have as a child is something we necessarily must lose.

I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.

To be ashamed of one's immorality: that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one's morality.

I am not young enough to know everything.

Whoever blushes is already guilty; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.

Anxiety is the beginning of conscience, which is the parent of the soul but is not compatible with innocence.

It is the public scandal that offends; to sin in secret is no sin at all.

To say of shame - what is it? Of virtue - we can miss it; Of sin-we can kiss it, And it's no longer sin.

I was concerned about doing the right thing when I was a kid. I suppose as a child, you're a massive egomaniac, and you think that everything you do is going to affect the world.

If you desire to be good, begin by believing that you are wicked.

A child who does not think about what happens around him and is content with living without wondering whether he lives honestly is like a man who lives from a scoundrel's work and is on the road to being a scoundrel.

Educate men without religion and you make of them but clever devils.

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.

I am not young enough to know everything.

One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.

Morals are an acquirement -- like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis -- no man is born with them.

Consider your origin; you were not born to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.

… knowledge without conscience is but the ruin of the soul

Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.

I once tried to figure out the first time I felt guilt, and it goes so far back that I might have been an inch long at the time.

No man knows the value of innocence and integrity but he who has lost them.

I have a very clear conscience.

As one grows older, one becomes wiser and more foolish.