English philosopher (1632-1704)
Knowledge is grateful to the understanding, as light to the eyes.
JOHN LOCKE
Some Thoughts Concerning Education
The understanding, like the eye, whilst it makes us see and perceive all other things, takes no notice of itself: and it requires art and pains to set it at a distance and make it its own object.
JOHN LOCKE
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Stubbornness and an obstinate disobedience must be mastered with blows.
JOHN LOCKE
attributed, John Locke: Prophet of Common Sense
If the Gospel and the Apostles may be credited, no man can be a Christian without charity, and without that faith which works, not by force, but by love.
JOHN LOCKE
Letters Concerning Toleration
One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.
JOHN LOCKE
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
He that uses his words loosely and unsteadily will either not be minded or not understood.
JOHN LOCKE
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
He that denies any of the doctrines that Christ has delivered, to be true, denies him to be sent from God, and consequently to be the Messiah; and so ceases to be a Christian.
JOHN LOCKE
The Reasonableness of Christianity
Moral laws are set as a curb and restraint to these exorbitant desires, which they cannot be but by rewards and punishments, that will over-balance the satisfaction any one shall propose to himself in the breach of the law.
JOHN LOCKE
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
A king that would not feel his crown too heavy for him, must wear it every day, but if he think it too light, he knoweth not of what metal it is made.
JOHN LOCKE
"Of a King", The Conduct of the Understanding: Essays, Moral, Economical, and Political
When we know our own strength, we shall the better know what to undertake with hopes of success; and when we have well surveyed the powers of our own minds, and made some estimate what we may expect from them, we shall not be inclined either to sit still, and not set our thoughts on work at all, in despair of knowing anything; nor on the other side, question everything, and declaim all knowledge, because some things are not to be understood.
JOHN LOCKE
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
When Fashion hath once Established, what Folly or craft began, Custom makes it Sacred, and 'twill be thought impudence or madness, to contradict or question it.
JOHN LOCKE
First Treatise of Government
For it will be very difficult to persuade men of sense that he who with dry eyes and satisfaction of mind can deliver his brother to the executioner to be burnt alive, does sincerely and heartily concern himself to save that brother from the flames of hell in the world to come.
JOHN LOCKE
Letters Concerning Toleration
This also shows wherein the identity of the same man consists, viz. in participation of the same continued life by particles of matter successively united to the same organized body.
JOHN LOCKE
Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding
The stage is more beholding to love, than the life of man; for as to the stage, love is even matter of comedies, and now and then of tragedies; but in life it doth much mischief; sometimes like a siren, sometimes like a fury.
JOHN LOCKE
"Of Love", The Conduct of the Understanding: Essays, Moral, Economical, and Political
For those who either perceive but dully, or retain the ideas that come into their minds but ill, who cannot readily excite or compound them, will have little matter to think on.
JOHN LOCKE
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Slavery is so vile and miserable an Estate of Man, and so directly opposite to the generous Temper and Courage of our Nation; that 'tis hardly to be conceived, that an Englishman, much less a Gentleman, should plead for't.
JOHN LOCKE
Second Treatise of Government
He would be laughed at, that should go about to make a fine dancer out of a country hedger, at past fifty. And he will not have much better success, who shall endeavour, at that age, to make a man reason well, or speak handsomely, who has never been used to it, though you should lay before him a collection of all the best precepts of logic or oratory.
JOHN LOCKE
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Nobody is made anything by hearing of rules, or laying them up in his memory; practice must settle the habit of doing, without reflecting on the rule; and you may as well hope to make a good painter, or musician, extempore, by a lecture and instruction in the arts of music and painting, as a coherent thinker, or a strict reasoner, by a set of rules, showing him wherein right reasoning consists.
JOHN LOCKE
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
To prejudge other men's notions before we have looked into them is not to show their darkness but to put out our own eyes.
JOHN LOCKE
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Power to do good is the true and lawful act of aspiring; for good thoughts (though God accept them), yet towards men are little better than good dreams, except they be put in act; and that cannot be without power and place, as the vantage and commanding ground.
JOHN LOCKE
"Of Great Place", The Conduct of the Understanding: Essays, Moral, Economical, and Political