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Rousseau is the most irritating, unsympathetic, conceited, delusional, selfish, portentous, and reptilian writer I've ever come across... but I like Swiss culture, and watchmaking, and the 18th century, and arrogant little Europeans with a penchant for walking long distances — and so, despite it all, I'm smitten. A book written by an abomination in knee breeches.

Rousseau is the most irritating, unsympathetic, conceited, delusional, selfish, portentous, and reptilian writer I've ever come across... but I like Swiss culture, and watchmaking, and the 18th century, and arrogant little Europeans with a penchant for walking long distances — and so, despite it all, I'm smitten. A book written by a human-sized rat in knee breeches.

Extraordinary and harrowing: a deluded narcissist grapples with shadows, attempting every evasive maneuver imaginable to avoid guilt.

Extraordinary and harrowing: a deluded narcissist grapples with shadows and attempts and and every evasive maneuver imaginable to avoid guilt.

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“To me she was the most tender of mothers, who never thought of her own pleasure but always of my good. And if there was a sensual side of my attachment to her, that did not alter its character, but only made it more enchanting. I was intoxicated with delight at having a young and pretty mamma whom I loved to caress”.
“I only felt the full strength of my attachment to her when she was out of my sight.” p.107

“In a word, I have myself up for he sweet sense of well-being I felt in her company, a state of mind which was undisturbed by any concern as to the means of preserving it. (…) Looking ahead always ruins my enjoyment. It is never any good for seeing the future. I have never known how to avoid it”. p.106

“For my souls has never known true blessings or disasters that depend on fortune alone. Indeed it is at times when I have lacked for nothing that I have felt myself the most miserable of mortals”.
“Although the emotional sensibility that gives rise to real joy is a work of Nature, and perhaps innate in our constitutions, it stands in need of situations in which it can develop”. p.104