John Locke Quotes
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Nature never makes excellent things, for mean or no uses: and it is hardly to be conceived, that our infinitely wise Creator, should make so admirable a Faculty, as the power of Thinking, that Faculty which comes nearest the Excellency of his own incomprehensible Being, to be so idlely and uselesly employ'd, at least 1/4 part of its time here, as to think constantly, without remembering any of those Thoughts, without doing any good to it self or others, or being anyway useful to any other part of Creation.
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Where all is but dream, reasoning and arguments are of no use, truth and knowledge nothing.
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The body of People may with Respect resist intolerable Tyranny.
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There are a thousand ways to Wealth, but only one way to Heaven.
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The beauty or uncomeliness of many things, in good and ill breeding, will be better learnt, and make deeper impressions on them, in the examples of others, than from any rules or instructions can be given about them.
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Who lies for you will lie against you.
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Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience.
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If pains be to be taken to give him a manly air and assurance betimes, it is chiefly as a fence to his virtue when he goes into the world under his own conduct.
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The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.
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..every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. .... The great and chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property.
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In the beginning, all the world was America.
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It is one thing to persuade, another to command; one thing to press with arguments, another with penalties.
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Our Business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our conduct.
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Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses.
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It is labour indeed that puts the difference on everything.
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Men's happiness or misery is [for the] most part of their own making.
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Knowledge being to be had only of visible and certain truth, error is not a fault of our knowledge, but a mistake of our judgment, giving assent to that which is not true.
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Children should from the beginning be bred up in an abhorrence of killing or tormenting any living creature; and be taught not to spoil or destroy any thing, unless it be for the preservation or advantage of some other that is nobler.
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Success in fighting means not coming at your opponent the way he wants to fight you.
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The works of nature and the works of revelation display religion to mankind in characters so large and visible that those who are not quite blind may in them see and read the first principles and most necessary parts of it and from thence penet into those infinite depths filled with the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
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Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.
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If all be a Dream, then he doth but dream that he makes the Question; and so it is not much matter that a waking Man should answer him.
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Preference of vice to virtue, a manifest wrong judgment.
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If by gaining knowledge we destroy our health, we labour for a thing that will be useless in our hands.