Choose language

Forgot your password?

Need a Spoofbox account? Create one for FREE!

No subscription or hidden extras

Login


I have entered upon a performance which is without example, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I mean to present my fellow-mortals with a man in all the integrity of nature; and this man shall be myself. 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. Whenever the last trumpet shall sound, I will present myself before the sovereign judge with this book in my hand, and loudly proclaim, thus have I acted; these were my thoughts; such was I. With equal freedom and veracity have I related what was laudable or wicked, I have concealed no crimes, added no virtues; and if I have sometimes introduced superfluous ornament, it was merely to occupy a void occasioned by defect of memory: I may have supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, but have never asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood. Such as I was, I have declared myself; sometimes vile and despicable, at others, virtuous, generous and sublime; even as thou hast read my inmost soul: Power eternal! assemble round thy throne an innumerable throng of my fellow-mortals, let them listen to my confessions, let them blush at my depravity, let them tremble at my sufferings; let each in his turn expose with equal sincerity the failings, the wanderings of his heart, and, if he dare, aver, I was better than that man.


Jean-Jacques Rousseau


#equality



Quote by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Read through all quotes from Jean-Jacques Rousseau



About Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes



Did you know about Jean-Jacques Rousseau?

Moreover Rousseau advocated the opinion that insofar as they lead people to virtue all religions are equally worthy and that people should therefore conform to the religion in which they have been brought up. Following the French Revolution other commentators fingered a potential danger of Rousseau’s project of realizing an “antique” conception of virtue amongst the citizenry in a modern world (e. Although in this state he deprives himself of some advantages which he got from nature he gains in return others so great his faculties are so stimulated and developed his ideas so extended his feelings so ennobled and his whole soul so uplifted that did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left he would be bound to bless continually the happy moment which took him from it for ever and instead of a stupid and unimaginative animal made him an intelligent being and a man.

Rousseau's novel Émile: or On Education is a treatise on the education of the whole person for citizenship. His sentimental novel Julie or the New Heloise was of importance to the development of pre-romanticism and romanticism in fiction. Rousseau's autobiographical writings—his Confessions which initiated the modern autobiography and his Reveries of a Solitary Walker—exemplified the late 18th-century movement known as the Age of Sensibility and featured an increased focus on subjectivity and introspection that later characterized modern writing.

back to top