John Locke Quotes on Knowledge
Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) gave early modern empiricism its founding statement. The mind at birth is a blank slate (tabula rasa); all the materials of human knowledge come from experience, divided into sensation (impressions of external objects) and reflection (impressions of the mind's own operations). Locke distinguishes simple ideas, which the mind passively receives, from complex ideas it actively constructs by combination, comparison, and abstraction; and he distinguishes primary qualities (figure, motion, solidity), which resemble their corresponding ideas, from secondary qualities (colors, sounds, tastes), which produce ideas in us without resembling anything in the object.
Quotes
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“No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.”
Book II, Ch. 1, sec. 19 -
“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”
As quoted in "Hand Book : Caution and Counsels" in The Common School Journal Vol. 5, No. 24 (15 December 1843) by Horace Mann , p. 371 -
“It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of truth.”
Book IV, Ch. 7, sec. 11 -
“There is frequently more to be learned from the unexpected questions of a child than the discourses of men.”
Sec. 121 -
Attributed to John Locke:
“Education begins the gentleman, but reading, good company, and reflection must finish him.”
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“New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not common.”
Dedicatory epistle, as quoted in Fred R Shapiro (2006). The Yale Book of Quotations . Yale University Press. p. 468. ISBN 0-300-10798-6 . -
“Wit and good nature meeting in a fair young lady as they do in you make the best resemblance of an angel that we know; and he that is blessed with the conversation and friendship of a person so extraordinary enjoys all that remains of paradise in this world.”
Letter to Mary Clarke (7 May 1682), quoted in Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (1957; 1985), p. 221 -
“But there is only one thing which gathers people into seditious commotion, and that is oppression .”
A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) -
“A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689)”
But there is only one thing which gathers people into seditious commotion, and that is oppression .