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Anonymous09/19/26, 18:39No.25541414Be honest /lit/
Have you actually read any of Rousseau's narrative works, or are you too scared you might like them?
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Anon09/19/26, 18:57No.25541457
I've only read his political tracts but I liked them. I think he's overhated honestly. Should I read Solitary Walker or Emile too?
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Anon09/19/26, 19:13No.25541479
Kant kept a portrait of Rousseau as the only decoration in his study and the only time he missed his autistic daily walking routine was when he was reading Emile.
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Anon09/19/26, 19:17No.25541487
>Rousseau, to whom Nature had granted in refinement and sentiment what she had granted only in wit to Voltaire, treated the novel in another way altogether. What vigor, what energy in La Nouvelle Heloise! While Momus was dictating Candide to Voltaire, love was etching with its flaming torch every burning page of Julie, and we can safely assert that this sublime book will never be bettered; may that truth cause the pen to fall from the hands of that legion of ephemeral writers who, for the past thirty years, have continued to pour out poor imitations of that immortal original; let them be made to feel that, in order to equal that work, they would have to possess a fiery soul like Rousseau's and a philosophic mind such as his— two traits Nature does not bring together in a single person more than once a century.
- Marquis de Sade>Rousseau has been my teacher since the age of fifteen. Rousseau and the Gospels have been the two great and beneficent influences of my life. Rousseau does not grow old. Just recently I happened to reread several of his works and I experienced the same sentiment of elevation of soul and of admiration that I experienced in my youth
- Tolstoy>A novel will be the higher and nobler the more inner and less outer life it depicts... Tristram Shandy, to be sure, has as good as no action whatever; but how very little action there is in La Nouvelle Héloïse and Wilhelm Meister! Even Don Quixote has relatively little... And these four novels are the crown of the genre
- Schopenhauer>Mama has presented me with the fine new Geneva edition of Rousseau; the Confessions are included. Even the few pages at which I have looked are like shining stars; imagine several volumes like that! What a heavenful! What a gift to mankind a noble human being is!
- Goethe>Rousseau is indeed in my mind the greatest man the world has produced since Milton
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Anon09/19/26, 19:18No.25541488
I like rousseau. the social contract made me like republicanism. his confessions was amazing too.
should I read emile?