Emile, or On Education quotes

God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.

Plants are fashioned by cultivation, man by education.

Civilised man is born and dies a slave. The infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the corpse is nailed down in his coffin.

Childhood has its own ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling; nothing is more foolish than to try and substitute our ways

What is this wonderful book? Is it Aristotle? Pliny? Buffon? No; it is Robinson Crusoe.

Then farewell Paris, far-famed Paris, with all your noise and smoke and dirt, where the women have ceased to believe in honour and the men in virtue.

When this principle is admitted, it follows that woman is specially made for man's delight.