John Locke Quotes
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As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivated, and can use the product of, so much is his property. He by his labour does, as it were, enclose it from the common.
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The body of People may with Respect resist intolerable Tyranny.
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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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Fashion for the most part is nothing but the ostentation of riches.
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In all things, therefore, where we have clear evidence from our ideas, and those principles of knowledge I have above mentioned, reason is the proper judge; and revelation, though it may, in consenting with it, confirm its dictates, yet cannot in such cases invalidate its decrees: nor can we be obliged, where we have the clear and evident sentience of reason, to quit it for the contrary opinion, under a pretence that it is matter of faith: which can have no authority against the plain and clear dictates of reason.
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Where all is but dream, reasoning and arguments are of no use, truth and knowledge nothing.
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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 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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Knowledge is grateful to the understanding, as light to the eyes.
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In the beginning, all the world was America.
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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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He that has his chains knocked off, and the prison doors set open to him, is perfectly at liberty, because he may either go or stay, as he best likes; though his preference be determined to stay, by the darkness of the night, or illness of the weather, or want of other lodging.
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Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses.
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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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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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It is labour indeed that puts the difference on everything.
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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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The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves.
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Our Business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our conduct.
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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 by gaining knowledge we destroy our health, we labour for a thing that will be useless in our hands.
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Men's happiness or misery is [for the] most part of their own making.
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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.