Top 200 John Locke Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Men always forget that human happiness is a disposition of mind and not a condition of circumstances.”

— John Locke

202. “One or two particulars may suggest hints of enquiry, and they do well who take those hints; but if they turn them into conclusions, and make them presently general rules, they are forward indeed, but it is only to impose on themselves by propositions assumed for truths without sufficient warrant.”

— John Locke

203. “The reservedness and distance that fathers keep, often deprive their sons of that refuge which would be of more advantage to them than an hundred rebukes or chidings.”

— John Locke

204. “Men in great fortunes are strangers to themselves, and while they are in the puzzle of business, they have no time to tend their health either of body or mind.”

— John Locke

205. “Though the familiar use of things about us take off our wonder, yet it cures not our ignorance.”

— John Locke

206. “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.”

— John Locke

207. “You shall find, that there cannot be a greater spur to the attaining what you would have the eldest learn, and know himself, than to set him upon teaching it his younger brothers and sisters.”

— John Locke

208. “Truths are not the better nor the worse for their obviousness or difficulty, but their value is to be measured by their usefulness and tendency.”

— John Locke

209. “Are you related to a Senator or some other type of career criminal?”

— John Locke

210. “The difference, so observable in men’s understandings and parts, does not arise so much from their natural faculties, as acquired habits.”

— John Locke

211. “Whenever law ends, tyranny begins.”

— John Locke

212. “Laws provide, as much as ispossible that the goods and health of subjects be not injured by the fraud and violence of others. They do not guard them from thenegligence or ill-husbandry of the possessors themselves.”

— John Locke

213. “He that makes use of another’s fancy or necessity to sell ribbons or cloth dearer to him than to another man at the same time, cheats him.”

— John Locke

214. “There are some Men of one, some but of two Syllogisms, and no more; and others that can but advance one step farther.”

— John Locke

215. “Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all.”

— John Locke

216. “Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society and made by the legislative power vested in it and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, arbitrary will of another man.”

— John Locke

217. “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

218. “I esteem it above all things necessary to distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion and to settle the just bounds that lie between the one and the other.”

— John Locke

219. “It is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge.”

— John Locke

220. “I attribute the little I know to my not having been ashamed to ask for information, and to my rule of conversing with all descriptions of men on those topics that form their own peculiar professions and pursuits.”

— John Locke

221. “Moral laws are set as a curb and restraint to these exorbitant desires, which they cannot be but by rewards and punishments, that will over-balance the satisfaction any one shall propose to himself in the breach of the law.”

— John Locke

222. “Many a good poetic vein is buried under a trade, and never produces any thing for want of improvement.”

— John Locke

223. “Set the mind to work, and apply the thoughts vigorously to the business, for it holds in the struggles of the mind, as in those of war, that to think we shall conquer is to conquer.”

— John Locke

224. “Thus the ideas, as well as children, of our youth, often die before us: and our minds represent to us those tombs to which we are approaching; where, though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time, and the imagery moulders away.”

— John Locke

225. “What humanity abhors, custom reconciles and recommends to us.”

— John Locke

226. “Sect. 4. TO understand political power right, and derive it from its original, we must consider, what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.”

— John Locke

227. “No man in civil society can be exempted from the laws of it: for if any man may do what he thinks fit, and there be no appeal on earth, for redress or security against any harm he shall do; I ask, whether he be not perfectly still in the state of nature, and so can be no part or member of that civil society; unless any one will say, the state of nature and civil society are one and the same thing, which I have never yet found any one so great a patron of anarchy as to affirm.”

— John Locke

228. “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

229. “The most perfect character is supposed to lie between those extremes; retaining an equal ability and taste for books, company, and business; preserving in conversation that discernment and delicacy which arise from polite letters; and in business, that probity and accuracy which are the natural result of a just philosophy.”

— John Locke

230. “This is that which I think great readers are apt to be mistaken in. Those who have read of every thing are thought to understand every thing too; but it is not always so. Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.”

— John Locke

231. “Beware how in making the portraiture thou breakest the pattern: for divinity maketh the love of ourselves the pattern; the love of our neighbours but the portraiture.”

— John Locke

232. “In many cases it is not one series of consequences will serve the turn, but many different and opposite deductions must be examined and laid together, before a man can come to make a right judgment of the point in question. What then can be expected from men that neither see the want of any such kind of reasoning as this, nor, if they do, know they how to set about it, or could perform it?”

— John Locke

233. “But, by the law of faith, faith is allowed to supply the defect of full obedience: and so the believers are admitted to life and immortality, as if they were righteous.”

— John Locke

234. “One hundred and one. No person above seventeen years of age shall have any benefit or protection of the law, or be capable of any place of profit or honor, who is not a member of some church or profession, having his name recorded in some one, and but one religious record at once.”

— John Locke

235. “Let not men think there is no truth but in the sciences that they study, or the books that they read. To prejudge other men’s notions before we have looked into them is not to shew their darkness, but to put out our own eyes.”

— John Locke

236. “For those who either perceive but dully, or retain the ideas that come into their minds but ill, who cannot readily excite or compound them, will have little matter to think on.”

— John Locke