Emile, or On Education

I shall always maintain that whoso says in his heart, "There is no God," while takes the name of God upon his lips, is either a liar or a madman.

— Emile, or On Education

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

— Emile, or On Education

Conscience is the voice of the soul; the passions are the voice of the body.

— Emile, or On Education

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.

— Emile, or On Education

We cannot teach children the danger of telling lies to men without realising, on the man's part, the danger of telling lies to children. A single untruth on the part of the master will destroy the results of his education.

— Emile, or On Education

Let us give him everything. Let us lavish charms and merit on him. Let him be handsome, very clever, and lovable. He will be sought out by women. But in seeking him out before he loves them, they will unhinge him rather than make a lover out of him. He will have successes, but he will have neither transports nor passion for enjoying them. Since his desires, always provided for in advance, never have time to be born, he feels in the bosom of pleasures only the boredom of constraint.

— Emile, or On Education

Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil... Blushes are the sign of guilt; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.

— Emile, or On Education

The one thing we do not know is the limit of the knowable. We prefer to trust to chance and to believe what is not true, rather than to own that not one of us can see what really is. A fragment of some vast whole whose bounds are beyond our gaze, a fragment abandoned by its Creator to our foolish quarrels, we are vain enough to want to determine the nature of that whole and our own relations with regard to it.

— Emile, or On Education

A young man when he enters society must be preserved from vanity rather than from sensibility; he succumbs rather to the tastes of others than to his own, and self-love is responsible for more libertines than love. Self-love makes more libertines than love.

— Emile, or On Education

Habit accustoms us to everything. What we see too much, we no longer imagine; and it is only imagination which makes us feel the ills of others. It is thus by dint of seeing death and suffering that priests and doctors become pitiless.

— Emile, or On Education

With the help of dice Descartes made heaven and earth; but he could not set his dice in motion, nor start the action of his centrifugal force without the help of rotation. Newton discovered the law of gravitation; but gravitation alone would soon reduce the universe to a motionless mass; he was compelled to add a projectile force to account for the elliptical course of the celestial bodies; let Newton show us the hand that launched the planets in the tangent of their orbits.

— Emile, or On Education

To exist is to feel; our feeling is undoubtedly earlier than our intelligence, and we had feelings before we had ideas.

— Emile, or On Education

Women have ready tongues; they talk earlier, more easily, and more pleasantly than men. They are also said to talk more; this may be true, but I am prepared to reckon it to their credit; eyes and mouth are equally busy and for the same cause. A man says what he knows, a woman says what will please; the one needs knowledge, the other taste; utility should be the man's object; the woman speaks to give pleasure. There should be nothing in common but truth.

— Emile, or On Education

So long as chastity is preserved, it is respected; it is despised only after having been lost.

— Emile, or On Education

So, decide to raise them [women] like men. The men will gladly consent to it! The more women want to resemble them, the less women will govern them, and then men will truly be the masters.

— Emile, or On Education

Sophie is not beautiful, but in her company men forget beautiful women, and beautiful women are dissatisfied with themselves.

— Emile, or On Education

One must choose between making a man or a citizen, for one cannot make both at the same time.

— Emile, or On Education

The abuse of books kills science. Believing that we know what we have read, we believe that we can dispense with learning it.

— Emile, or On Education