Quotes By John Locke

An excellent man, like precious metal, is in every way invariable; A villain, like the beams of a balance, is always varying, upwards and downwards.

Our deeds disguise us. People need endless time to try on their deeds, until each knows the proper deeds for him to do. But every day, every hour, rushes by. There is no time.

The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.

To love our neighbor as ourselves is such a truth for regulating human society, that by that alone one might determine all the cases in social morality.

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

Fashion for the most part is nothing but the ostentation of riches.

We are like chameleons, we take our hue and the color of our moral character, from those who are around us.

Fortitude is the guard and support of the other virtues.

The improvement of understanding is for two ends: first, our own increase of knowledge; secondly, to enable us to deliver that knowledge to others.

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.

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

A sound mind in a sound body, is a short, but full description of a happy state in this World: he that has these two, has little more to wish for; and he that wants either of them, will be little the better for anything else.

All wealth is the product of labor.

Any one reflecting upon the thought he has of the delight, which any present or absent thing is apt to produce in him, has the idea we call love.

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

The reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property.

Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself.

Our incomes are like our shoes; if too small, they gall and pinch us; but if too large, they cause us to stumble and to trip.

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

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.

Reverie is when ideas float in our mind without reflection or regard of the understanding.

Things of this world are in so constant a flux, that nothing remains long in the same state.

The Bible is one of the greatest blessings bestowed by God on the children of men. It has God for its author; salvation for its end, and truth without any mixture for its matter. It is all pure.

What worries you, masters you.

The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of law, where there is no law, there is no freedom.

Where all is but dream, reasoning and arguments are of no use, truth and knowledge nothing.

I have spent more than half a lifetime trying to express the tragic moment.

As people are walking all the time, in the same spot, a path appears.

There cannot be greater rudeness than to interrupt another in the current of his discourse.

Government has no other end, but the preservation of property.