An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Quotes

Where all is but dream, reasoning and arguments are of no use, truth and knowledge nothing.

One unerring mark of it, viz., the not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.[about love of truth]

No man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience.

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.

Where there is no property there is no injustice.

When we know our own strength, we shall the better know what to undertake with hopes of success; and when we have well surveyed the powers of our own minds, and made some estimate what we may expect from them, we shall not be inclined either to sit still, and not set our thoughts on work at all, in despair of knowing any thing; nor, on the other side, question every thing, and declaim all knowledge, because some things are not to be understood.

When ideas float in our mind without reflection or regard of the understanding.[about Réverie]

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

There cannot any one moral rule be proposed whereof a man may not justly demand a reason.

There are very few lovers of truth, for truth’s sake, even amongst those who persuade themselves that they are so.

The understanding, like the eye, whilst it makes us see and perceive all other things, takes no notice of itself; and it requires art and pains to set it at a distance and make it its own object.

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.