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Quotes from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding — John Locke

1632–1704 England

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18 quotes

There cannot any one moral Rule be propos'd, whereof a Man may not justly demand a Reason.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of the truth.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

The boundaries of the species, whereby men sort them, are made by men.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

All men are liable to error; and most men are, in many points, by passion or interest, under temptation to it.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

Preference of vice to virtue, a manifest wrong judgment.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

He that uses his words loosely and unsteadily will either not be minded or not understood.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

He that knows anything, knows this, in the first place, that he need not seek long for instances of his ignorance."

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

Whoever goes beyond this measure of assent, it is plain receives not the truth in the love of it; loves not truth for truth's sake, but for some other bye-end.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

He that would seriously set upon the search of truth, ought in the first place to prepare his mind with a love of it. For he that loves it not, will not take much pains to get it; nor be much concerned when he misses it.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

The necessity of believing without knowledge, nay often upon very slight grounds, in this fleeting state of action and blindness we are in, should make us more busy and careful to inform ourselves than constrain others.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

I doubt not, but from self-evident Propositions, by necessary Consequences, as incontestable as those in Mathematics, the measures of right and wrong might be made out.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

He that uses words without any clear and steady meaning, what does he but lead himself and others into errors? And he that designedly does it, ought to be looked on as an enemy to truth and knowledge.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

False and doubtful positions, relied upon as unquestionable maxims, keep those who build on them in the dark from truth. Such are usually the prejudices imbibed from education, party, reverence, fashion, interest, et cetera.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

Religion, which should most distinguish us from the beasts, and ought most particularly elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

Since sounds have no natural connection with our ideas ... the doubtfulness and uncertainty of their signification ... has its cause more in the ideas they stand for than in any incapacity there is in one sound more than another to signify any idea.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: John Locke (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.