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10 December 2011

Quotations from Jean Jacques Rousseau's Reveries of a Solitary Walker

However men wish to see me, they cannot change my being, and in spite of their power and all their secret plots, I shall continue, whatever they may do, to be what I am in spite of them.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker
from the chapter entitled “Eighth Walk”

Believe me, that is not the place where J.-J. will go looking for amusement.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker
from the chapter entitled “Seventh Walk”

But I do not regret these experiences, since reflecting on them has given me new insights into my knowledge of myself and the real motives for my behavior on a thousand occasions about which I have deluded myself.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker,
from the chapter “Sixth Walk”

I have never believed that man’s freedom consisted in doing what he wants to do, but rather in never doing what he does not want to do, and this is the freedom I have always craved and often enjoyed and because of which I have most scandalized my contemporaries.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker,
from the chapter “Sixth Walk”

I may be no better, but at least I am different.

When my destiny threw me back into the torrent of the world, I could not find anything there that pleased my heart even for a moment. Wherever I went I missed my sweet freedom and I felt indifference and disgust for anything that came my way that could lead to fortune and fame.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, chapter entitled “Third Walk”

So here I am, all alone on this earth…But what about me, cut off from them and everything else, what am I? This is what remains for me to find out now.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, opening lines to Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Chapter 1 entitled First Walk.

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