John Locke Quotes

As I enter on the path of happiness, I scatter the dregs and shreds and clippings of the past behind me. I divest myself of all the crapulous years.

The measure of my success is the measure of my happiness.

Beyond all the fires of love through which one passes there is the star of Duty, and happy the individual who can live in its serenity.

Have you ever considered what anxious thought, what consummate knowledge of human nature, what dearly-bought experiences go into the making of an advertisement?

No matter through what realms of the fantastic you may travel, you arrive inevitably at the commonplace.

Life is too transcendentally humorous for a man not to take it seriously. Compared with it, Death is but a shallow jest.

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

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

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

When we find out an Idea, by whose Intervention we discover the Connexion of two others, this is a Revelation from God to us, by the voice of Reason.

Being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.

The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.

Men being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent.

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

[M]an is not permitted without censure to follow his own thoughts in the search of truth, when they lead him ever so little out of the common road.

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

All men are liable to error and most men are ... by passion or interest under temptation to it.

God when he makes the prophet does not unmake the man.

It is a man's proper business to seek happiness and avoid misery.

To give a man full knowledge of true morality I would send him to no other book than the New Testament.

Fear is an uneasiness of the mind upon the thought of a future evil likely to befall us.

The thoughts that come often unsought and as it were drop into the mind are commonly the most valuable of any we have.

All wealth is the product of labor

We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are the signs of our ideas only and not for things themselves.

Education begins the gentleman, but reading, good company and reflection must finish him.