Jean-Jacques Rousseau cytaty

strona 3

„Pieniądze, które mamy, są narzędziem wolności. Pieniądze, za którymi się uganiamy – narzędziem niewoli.”

„Kobieta wybaczy wszystko poza tym, że nie wzbudziła pożądania.”

„Nie możecie przeszkodzić, by was nie połknęli – postarajcie się przynajmniej, by was nie mogli strawić.”

„Człowiek rodzi się wolny, a wszędzie tkwi w kajdanach.”

„Miłości nie udowadnia się słowami.”

„Kobiety nie są stworzone do biegania, uciekają więc, aby być złowionymi.”

„Kobieta ma wszystko przeciw sobie, nasze błędy, swoją nieśmiałość, swoją słabość; broni ją tylko jej inteligencja i uroda. Czyż więc nie powinna doskonalić jednej i drugiej? Ale uroda nie jest powszechna; ginie z powodu tysiąca wypadków, niszczeje z wiekiem; przyzwyczajenie osłabia jej znaczenie. Tylko sama inteligencja jest prawdziwą szansą płci.”

„Mężczyźni będą zawsze tym, co zrobiły z nich kobiety.”

„Nieraz na myśl mi przychodzi to, że gdyby można było utrwalić szczęście miłości w małżeństwie, mielibyśmy raj na ziemi.”

„Myśląc o tym co chcecie zyskać, nie zapominajcie co możecie stracić, poprawiajcie jeśli możecie, błędy tej konstrukcji, ale nie pogardzajcie nią, to ona uczyniła was tym czym jesteście.”

„Zbyt dobrze znam ludzi,
aby nie dostrzec,
że obrażony zawsze przebacza,
ale obrażający nigdy.”

„Kto lubi swą strzechę, kocha też swą żonę.”

„Widzę w tym pana i niewolnika, nie widzę narodu i jej naczelnika.”

„Najtrudniej przyznać się do tego, co wstydliwe.”

„Cnota to często tylko niezdolność do odczuwania przyjemności.”

„Każda chwila, która mogłaby być wykorzystana lepiej, jest stracona.”

„Jeśli pozbawicie wasze serca umiłowania piękna, pozbawicie się całego piękna życia.”

„Najlepsze listy miłosne powstają, kiedy z góry nie wie się, co się będzie pisało, i potem też się nie pamięta, co się pisało.”

„Miłość zawsze jest patetyczna. Jej patos jest do zniesienia dla każdego. Dla każdego – zakochanego.”

„Pękną węzły (małżeńskie), jeżeli je zbyt mocno ścisnąć zechcemy.”

„Astronomia zrodziła się z przesądów, elokwencja z ambicji, nienawiści, fałszu i pochlebstwa, geometria z chciwości, fizyka z próżnej ciekawości, nawet filozofia moralna z ludzkiej pychy. Tak więc sztuki i nauki zawdzięczają swoje powstanie naszym wadom.”

„Dowiedziałem się więc z doświadczenia, że źródło prawdziwego szczęścia bije w nas samych, oraz że tego, kto umie, wysiłkiem woli być szczęśliwym, nie potrafią uczynić godnym pożałowania żadne ludzkie moce.”

„Jeśli nie potrafimy zapobiec pożarciu nas przez wrogów, postarajmy się przynajmniej, by nie mogli nas strawić.”

„Wszystko jest dobre, gdy wychodzi z rąk twórcy {rzeczy}; wszystko wyrodnieje w rękach człowieka.”

„Społeczeństwo obywatelskie jest stanem wzajemnej współzależności wszystkich ludzi, ludzie wszakże są źli, a większość z nich jest zmuszona zrezygnować z własnej woli i pracować na rzecz zaspokojenia potrzeb nielicznych. Ponieważ zaś to ci nieliczni ustalają prawa, większość ludzi nie ma nawet zapewnionej ochrony, dla której rzekomo dołączyli się do społeczeństwa. (…) To właśnie w społeczeństwie człowiek zaczyna pożądać pieniędzy i zaszczytów. (…) W pogoni za zaspokojeniem próżności natrafia na niekończącą się ilość okazji do sporu. (…) Naturalna namiętność współczucia zostaje wygaszona, a jedynym jej substytutem w nowych warunkach staje się moralność określająca ludzkie obowiązki i wspierana autorytetem władzy. Natura przestaje wystarczać. Przerażający stan wojny czyni ten krok koniecznym i gwarantuje zgodę biednych. (…) nierówność nabiera mocy prawnej – publiczna władza podporządkowuje sobie biednych dzięki przemocy.”

„Człowiek, który się zastanawia, jest zwierzęciem wynaturzonym.”

„Tylko miłość potrafi zatrzymać czas.”

„Zgryzoty wzajemnie sobie czynione, zawsze spadają w małżeństwie na tego, kto je wywołał.”

„Ani z miłości, ani ze związku małżeńskiego bynajmniej nie wypływa potrzeba nieustannej łączności obu płci. Mąż i żona powinni bezwzględnie żyć razem, lecz nie tym samym trybem; powinni działać zgodnie, nie czyniąc tych samych rzeczy.”

„Cierpliwość jest gorzka, ale jej owoce są słodkie.”

„Umiarkowanie i praca są prawdziwymi lekarzami człowieka: praca wzmaga apetyt, wstrzemięźliwość zaś zabrania nadużywać go.”

„Imam się przedsięwzięcia, które dotychczas nie miało przykładu i nie będzie miało naśladowcy.”

„Dzieciństwo jest snem rozumu.”

„Zapominacie, że owoce należą do wszystkich, a ziemia – nie należy do nikogo.”

„Kto pozwala źle mówić o przedmiocie miłości swojej, albo wcale nie kocha, albo jest podły.”

„Liga moich prześladowców ma zasięg światowy.”

“It is a mistake to classify the passions as lawful and unlawful, so as to yield to the one and refuse the other. All alike are good if we are their masters; all alike are bad if we abandon ourselves to them. Nature forbids us to extend our relations beyond the limits of our strength; reason forbids us to want what we cannot get, conscience forbids us, not to be tempted, but to yield to temptation. To feel or not to feel a passion is beyond our control, but we can control ourselves. Every sentiment under our own control is lawful; those which control us are criminal. A man is not guilty if he loves his neighbour's wife, provided he keeps this unhappy passion under the control of the law of duty; he is guilty if he loves his own wife so greatly as to sacrifice everything to that love.”

“Days of absence, sad and dreary,
Clothed in sorrow's dark array,—
Days of absence, I am weary:
She I love is far away.”

“I remembered the way out suggested by a great princess when told that the peasants had no bread: "Well, let them eat cake."”

“The thirst after happiness is never extinguished in the heart of man.”

“The offender never forgives.”

“A country cannot subsist well without liberty, nor liberty without virtue.”

“What good would it be to possess the whole universe if one were its only survivor?”

“J. J. did not always flee from men, but he has always loved solitude. He enjoyed himself with the friends he velieved he had, but he enjoyed himself still more alone. He valued their society, but he sometimes needed to withdraw, and he would perhaps have preferred to live always alone than always with them.”

“Remorse sleeps during a prosperous period but wakes up in adversity.”

“All that time is lost which might be better employed.”

“He neither seeks nor avoids talking about his enemies. When he does speak of them, it is with pride without disdain, humor without rancor, reproach without bitterness, frankness without spite. And in the same way, he speaks of his rivals for glory only with deserved praises that conceal no hidden venom, which can certainly not be said of the praise they sometimes give him. But what I find in him that is most rare in an Author and and even in a sensitive man is the most perfect tolerance in matters of feelings and opinions, and the putting aside of all partisan spirit, even in his own favor; wanting freely to state his opinion and his reasons when the issue demands it, and even doing so with passion when his heart is agitated; but not blaming people for not adopting what he feels any more than he puts up with anyone's wish to deprive him of his feeling; and giving everyone the same freedom of thought as he insists on having for himself. I hear everyone talk about tolerance, but he is the only truly tolerant person I have known.”

“Our island is this earth; and the most striking object we behold is the sun. As soon as we pass beyond our immediate surroundings, one or both of these must meet our eye. Thus the philosophy of most savage races is mainly directed to imaginary divisions of the earth or to the divinity of the sun.”

“I want you to read the true system of the heart, drafted by a decent man and published under another name. I do not want you to be biased against good and useful books merely because a man unworthy of reading them has the audacity to call himself the Author.”

“There as here, passions are the motive of all action, but they are livelier, more ardent, or merely simpler and purer, thereby assuming a totally different character. All the first movements of nature are good and right.”

“Accent is the soul of language; it gives to it both feeling and truth.”

“As a man's conduct is controlled by public fact, so is her religion ruled by authority. The daughter should follow her mother's religion, the wife her husband's. Were that religion false, the docility which leads mother and daughter to submit to nature's laws would blot out the sin of error in the sight of Goddess. Unable to judge for themselves they should accept the judgment of father and husband as that of the church. While men unaided cannot deduce the rules of their faith, neither can they assign limits to that faith by the evidence of reason; they allow themselves to be driven hither and thither by all sorts of external influences, they are ever above or below the truth. Extreme in everything, they are either altogether reckless or altogether pious; you never find them able to combine virtue and piety. Their natural exaggeration is not wholly to blame; the ill-regulated control exercised over them by men is partly responsible. Loose morals bring religion into contempt; the terrors of remorse make it a tyrant; this is why women have always too much or too little religion. As a woman's religion is controlled by authority it is more important to show her plainly what to believe than to explain the reasons for belief; for faith attached to ideas half-understood is the main source of fanaticism, and faith demanded on behalf of what is absurd leads to madness or unbelief. Whether our catechisms tend to produce impiety rather than fanaticism I cannot say, but I do know that they lead to one or other. In the first place, when you teach religion to little girls never make it gloomy or tiresome, never make it a task or a duty, and therefore never give them anything to learn by heart, not even their prayers. Be content to say your own prayers regularly in their presence, but do not compel them to join you. Let their prayers be short, as Christ himself has taught us. Let them always be said with becoming reverence and respect; remember that if we ask the Almighty to give heed to our words, we should at least give heed to what we mean to say.”

“A kind of music far superior, in my opinion, to that of operas, and which in all Italy has not its equal, nor perhaps in the whole world, is that of the 'scuole'. The 'scuole' are houses of charity, established for the education of young girls without fortune, to whom the republic afterwards gives a portion either in marriage or for the cloister. Amongst talents cultivated in these young girls, music is in the first rank. Every Sunday at the church of each of the four 'scuole', during vespers, motettos or anthems with full choruses, accompanied by a great orchestra, and composed and directed by the best masters in Italy, are sung in the galleries by girls only; not one of whom is more than twenty years of age. I have not an idea of anything so voluptuous and affecting as this music; the richness of the art, the exquisite taste of the vocal part, the excellence of the voices, the justness of the execution, everything in these delightful concerts concurs to produce an impression which certainly is not the mode, but from which I am of opinion no heart is secure. Carrio and I never failed being present at these vespers of the 'Mendicanti', and we were not alone. The church was always full of the lovers of the art, and even the actors of the opera came there to form their tastes after these excellent models. What vexed me was the iron grate, which suffered nothing to escape but sounds, and concealed from me the angels of which they were worthy. I talked of nothing else. One day I spoke of it at Le Blond's; "If you are so desirous," said he, "to see those little girls, it will be an easy matter to satisfy your wishes. I am one of the administrators of the house, I will give you a collation [light meal] with them." I did not let him rest until he had fulfilled his promise. In entering the saloon, which contained these beauties I so much sighed to see, I felt a trembling of love which I had never before experienced. M. le Blond presented to me one after the other, these celebrated female singers, of whom the names and voices were all with which I was acquainted. Come, Sophia, — she was horrid. Come, Cattina, — she had but one eye. Come, Bettina, — the small-pox had entirely disfigured her. Scarcely one of them was without some striking defect.
Le Blond laughed at my surprise; however, two or three of them appeared tolerable; these never sung but in the choruses; I was almost in despair. During the collation we endeavored to excite them, and they soon became enlivened; ugliness does not exclude the graces, and I found they possessed them. I said to myself, they cannot sing in this manner without intelligence and sensibility, they must have both; in fine, my manner of seeing them changed to such a degree that I left the house almost in love with each of these ugly faces. I had scarcely courage enough to return to vespers. But after having seen the girls, the danger was lessened. I still found their singing delightful; and their voices so much embellished their persons that, in spite of my eyes, I obstinately continued to think them beautiful.”

“As soon as we have contrived to give our pupil an idea of the word "Useful," we have got an additional means of controlling him, for this word makes a great impression on him, provided that its meaning for him is a meaning relative to his own age, and provided he clearly sees its relation to his own well-being. This word makes no impression on your scholars because you have taken no pains to give it a meaning they can understand, and because other people always undertake to supply their needs so that they never require to think for themselves, and do not know what utility is. "What is the use of that?"”

“Oh providence! Oh nature! Treasure of the poor, resource of the unfortunate. The person who feels, knows your holy laws and trusts them, the person whose heart is at peace and whose body does not suffer, thanks to you is not entirely prey to adversity.”

“Let us not forget what befits our present state in the pursuit of vain fancies. Mankind has its place in the sequence of things; childhood has its place in the sequence of human life; the man must be treated as a man and the child as a child. Give each his place, and keep him there. Control human passions according to man's nature; that is all we can do for his welfare. The rest depends on external forces, which are beyond our control.”

“At first our pupil had merely sensations, now he has ideas; he could only feel, now he reasons. For from the comparison of many successive or simultaneous sensations and the judgment arrived at with regard to them, there springs a sort of mixed or complex sensation which I call an idea. The way in which ideas are formed gives a character to the human mind. The mind which derives its ideas from real relations is thorough; the mind which relies on apparent relations is superficial. He who sees relations as they are has an exact mind; he who fails to estimate them aright has an inaccurate mind; he who concocts imaginary relations, which have no real existence, is a madman; he who does not perceive any relation at all is an imbecile. Clever men are distinguished from others by their greater or less aptitude for the comparison of ideas and the discovery of relations between them. Simple ideas consist merely of sensations compared one with another. Simple sensations involve judgments, as do the complex sensations which I call simple ideas. In the sensation the judgment is purely passive; it affirms that I feel what I feel. In the percept or idea the judgment is active; it connects, compares, it discriminates between relations not perceived by the senses. That is the whole difference; but it is a great difference. Nature never deceives us; we deceive ourselves.”

“It is unfortunate for J. J that Rousseau cannot say everything he knows about him.”

“The origin of our passions, the root and spring of all the rest, the only one which is born with man, which never leaves him as long as he lives, is self-love; this passion is primitive, instinctive, it precedes all the rest, which are in a sense only modifications of it. In this sense, if you like, they are all natural. But most of these modifications are the result of external influences, without which they would never occur, and such modifications, far from being advantageous to us, are harmful. They change the original purpose and work against its end; then it is that man finds himself outside nature and at strife with himself.”

“As for the Soothsayer, although I am certain no one feels the true beauties of that work better than I, I am far from finding these beauties in the same places as the infatuated public does. They are not the products of study and knowledge, but rather are inspired by taste and sensitivity.”

“When you reached the age of reason, I secured you from the influence of human prejudice; when your heart awoke I preserved you from the sway of passion. Had I been able to prolong this inner tranquillity till your life's end, my work would have been secure, and you would have been as happy as man can be; but, my dear Emile, in vain did I dip you in the waters of Styx, I could not make you everywhere invulnerable; a fresh enemy has appeared, whom you have not yet learnt to conquer, and from whom I cannot save you. That enemy is yourself. Nature and fortune had left you free. You could face poverty, you could bear bodily pain; the sufferings of the heart were unknown to you; you were then dependent on nothing but your position as a human being; now you depend on all the ties you have formed for yourself; you have learnt to desire, and you are now the slave of your desires. Without any change in yourself, without any insult, any injury to yourself, what sorrows may attack your soul, what pains may you suffer without sickness, how many deaths may you die and yet live! A lie, an error, a suspicion, may plunge you in despair.”

“I know my heart, and have studied mankind; I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I at least claim originality, and whether Nature did wisely in breaking the mould with which she formed me, can only be determined after having read this work.”

“Sensitivity is the principle of all action. A being, albeit animated, who would feel nothing, would never act, for what would its motive for acting be? God himself is sensitive since he acts. All men are therefore sensitive, and perhaps to the same degree, but not in the same manner. There is a purely passive physical and organic sensitivity which seems to have as its end only the preservation of our bodies and of our species through the direction of pleasure and pain. There is another sensitivity that I call active and moral which is nothing other than the faculty of attaching our affections to beings who are foreign to us. This type, about which study of nerve pairs teaches nothing, seems to offer a fairly clear analogy for souls to the magnetic faculty of bodies. Its strength is in proportion to the relationships we feel between ourselves and other beings, and depending on the nature of these relationships it sometimes acts positively by attraction, sometimes negatively by repulsion, like the poles of a magnet. The positive or attracting action is the simple work of nature, which seeks to extend and reinforce the feeling of our being; the negative or repelling action, which compresses and diminishes the being of another, is a combination produced by reflection. From the former arise all the loving and gentle passions, and from the latter all the hateful and cruel passions.”

“There is only one man who gets his own way—he who can get it single-handed; therefore freedom, not power, is the greatest good. That man is truly free who desires what he is able to perform, and does what he desires. This is my fundamental maxim. Apply it to childhood, and all the rules of education spring from it. Society has enfeebled man, not merely by robbing him of the right to his own strength, but still more by making his strength insufficient for his needs. This is why his desires increase in proportion to his weakness; and this is why the child is weaker than the man. If a man is strong and a child is weak it is not because the strength of the one is absolutely greater than the strength of the other, but because the one can naturally provide for himself and the other cannot. Thus the man will have more desires and the child more caprices, a word which means, I take it, desires which are not true needs, desires which can only be satisfied with the help of others.”

“Hatred, as well as love, renders its votaries credulous.”