John Locke - An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

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Truth scarce ever yet carried it by Vote any where at its first appearance: New Opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other Reason, but because they are not already common.

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

John Locke
Nobody is under an obligation to know every thing. Knowledge and science in general is the business only of those who are at ease and leisure.

John Locke
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.

John Locke
Every step the mind takes in its progress towards knowledge, makes some discovery, which is not only new, but the best too, for the time at least.

John Locke
To measure motion, space is as necessary to be considered as time....[They] are made use of to denote the position of finite: real beings, in respect one to another, in those infinite uniform oceans of duration and space.

John Locke
Things in print must stand and fall by their own worth, or the reader's fancy.

John Locke
A blind fortuitous concourse of atoms, not guided by an understanding agent.

John Locke
The highest probability amounts not to certainty, without which there can be no true knowledge.

John Locke
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.

John Locke
There seems to be a constant decay of all our ideas; even of those which are struck deepest, and in minds the most retentive; so that if they be not sometimes renewed, by repeated exercises of the senses, or reflection on those kinds of objects which at first occasioned them, the print wears out, and at last there remains nothing to be seen.

John Locke
The study of mathematics would show... the necessity there is in reasoning, to separate all the distinct ideas, and to see the habitudes that all those concerned in the present inquiry have to one another, and to lay by those which relate not to the proposition in hand, and wholly to leave them out of the reckoning.

John Locke
Reason is natural revelation, whereby the eternal Father of light, and fountain of all knowledge communicates to mankind that portion of truth which he has laid within the reach of their natural faculties.

John Locke
It is vain to find fault with those arts of deceiving wherein men find pleasure to be deceived.

John Locke
It is therefore worthwhile, to search out the bounds between opinion and knowledge; and examine by what measures, in things, whereof we have no certain knowledge, we ought to regulate our assent, and moderate our persuasions.

John Locke
For number applies itself to men, angels, actions, thoughts; everything that either doth exist, or can be imagined.

John Locke
The parts of pure space are immovable, which follows from their inseparability; motion being nothing but change of distance between any two things; but this cannot be between parts that are inseparable; which therefore must needs be at perpetual rest one amongst other.

John Locke
If a man had a positive idea of infinite - he could add two infinites together: nay, make one infinite infinitely bigger than another, absurdities too gross to be confuted.

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

John Locke
I have put into thy hands what has been the diversion of some of my idle and heavy hours. If it has the good luck to prove so of any of thine, and thou hast but half so much pleasure in reading as I had in writing it, thou wilt as little think thy money, as I do my pains, ill bestowed.

John Locke
Untruth being unacceptable to the mind of man, there is no other defence left for absurdity but obscurity.

John Locke
Probability is the appearance of agreement upon fallible proofs.

John Locke
But of all other ideas, it is number, which I think furnishes us with the clearest and most distinct idea of infinity we are capable of.

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

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

John Locke
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.

John Locke
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.

John Locke
Crooked things may be as stiff and unflexible as straight: and men may be as positive in error as in truth.

John Locke
The senses at first let in particular Ideas, and furnish the yet empty Cabinet: And the Mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them, they are lodged in the Memory, and Names got to them.

John Locke
There are very few lovers of truth, for truth-sake, even among those who persuade themselves that they are so.

John Locke