Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.

Doubt yourself and you doubt everything you see. Judge yourself and you see judges everywhere. But if you listen to the sound of your own voice, you can rise above doubt and judgment. And you can see forever.

Doubt everything. Find your own light.

In philosophy you're never 100% sure. You're always undermining what you think you know. That's always been my philosophy and my intellectual ethos.

Rely upon your own judgment; be true to your own conscience; follow the light that is within you; all outward lights are so many will-o'-the-wisps. There will be those who tell you that you are foolish; that your judgment is faulty; that your conscience is all awry, and that the light within you is darkness; but heed them not. If what they say is true, the sooner you, as a searcher of wisdom, find it out the better, and you can only make that discovery by bringing your powers to the test. Therefore, pursue your course bravely.

Don't believe me, don't believe yourself, and don't believe anyone else.

The supreme triumph of reason is to cast doubt upon its own validity.

The conduct of a man, who studies philosophy in this careless manner, is more truly sceptical than that of any one, who feeling inhimself an inclination to it, is yet so over-whelm'd with doubts and scruples, as totally to reject it. A true sceptic will be diffident of his philosophical doubts, as well as of his philosophical conviction; and will never refuse any innocent satisfaction, which offers itself, upon account of either of them.

The whole is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspence of judgment appear the only result of ourmost accurate scrutiny, concerning this subject. But such is the frailty of human reason, and such the irresistible contagion of opinion, that even this deliberate doubt could scarcely be upheld; did we not enlarge our view, and opposing one species of superstition to another, set them a quarrelling; while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy.

You can’t force yourself to trust. So you put all your doubts in a little box and bury it deep and then try to forget where you buried it

When I was 16 I started keeping a diary in which I recorded my disagreements with the famous philosophers. I didn't insist that they were wrong, that I was right and I had to prevail. I just agreed and disagreed with them. I thought there was a high degree of probability that I was right and some other thinkers were wrong. But I wasn't positive about it.

There are many different kinds of doubt. When we doubt the future, we call it worry. When doubt other people we call is suspicion. When we doubt ourselves we call it inferiority. When we doubt God we call it unbelief. When we doubt what we hear on television we call it intelligence! When we doubt everything we call it cynicism or skepticism.

I am not my own light unto myself.

Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

Descartes spent far too much time in bed subject to the persistent hallucination that he was thinking. You are not free from a similar disorder.

I shouldn't believe anything I say, if I were you-and that includes what I just told you.

I used to get the feeling, and sometimes I still get it, that I was fooling somebody - I don't know who or what - maybe myself. I have feelings some days where there are scenes with a lot of responsibility, and I'll wish, 'Gee, if only I had been a cleaning woman.'

Doubt is the big machine. It grinds up the delusions of women and men.

In dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt, it is not the right method to tell him to stop doubting. It is rather the right method to tell him to go on doubting, to doubt a little more, to doubt every day newer and wilder things in the universe, until at last, by some strange enlightenment, he may begin to doubt himself.

Be a light unto oneself

Scepticism is always a back road leading to some credo or other.

Skepticism means, not intellectual doubt alone, but moral doubt.

If you are often deceived by those around you, you may be sure that you deserve to be deceived; and that instead of railing at the general falseness of mankind, you have first to pronounce judgment on your own jealous tyranny, or on your own weak credulity.

This notion [skepticism] is more clearly understood by asking "What do I know?"