John Locke Quotes on Mind
Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) presents the mind at birth as white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas — the famous tabula rasa doctrine. All the materials of human thought are supplied by experience, in two streams: sensation (the impact of external objects on the senses) and reflection (the mind's awareness of its own operations). The simple ideas thus received are the ultimate building blocks; complex ideas — substances, modes, relations — are constructed by the mind's combining, comparing, and abstracting. The framework defines the empiricist tradition Berkeley and Hume would refine and Kant would attempt to integrate with the rationalist program.
Quotes
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“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 -
“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:
“The dread of evil is a much more forcible principle of human actions than the prospect of good.”
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“The three great things that govern mankind are reason, passion and superstition. The first governs a few, the two last share the bulk of mankind and possess them in their turns. But superstition most powerfully produces the greatest mischief.”
Journal entry (16 May 1681), quoted in Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (1957; 1985), p. 200