John Locke Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. 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. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

2. To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.

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

4. For where is the man that has incontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or of the falsehood of all he condemns; or can say that he has examined to the bottom all his own, or other men's opinions? The necessity of believing without knowledge, nay often upon very slight grounds, in this fleeting state of action and blindness we are in, should make us more busy and careful to inform ourselves than constrain others. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

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

6. The only defense against the world is a thorough knowledge of it. Some Thoughts Concerning Education

7. the UNDERSTANDING— who does not know that, as it is the most elevated faculty of the soul, so it is employed with a greater and more constant delight than any of the other. Its searches after truth are a sort of hawking and hunting, wherein the very pursuit makes a great part of the pleasure. Every step the mind takes in its progress towards Knowledge makes some discovery ... the understanding, like the eye, judging of objects only by its own sight, cannot but be pleased with what it discovers, having less regret for what has escaped it, because it is unknown. Thus he who has raised himself above the alms-basket, and, not content to live lazily on scraps of begged opinions, sets his own thoughts on work, to find and follow truth, will (whatever he lights on) not miss the hunter’s satisfaction; every moment of his pursuit will reward his pains with some delight; and he will have reason to think his time not ill spent, even when he cannot much boast of any great acquisition. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in Four Books 2