Quotes from book
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is a work by John Locke concerning the foundation of human knowledge and understanding. It first appeared in 1689 with the printed title An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding. He describes the mind at birth as a blank slate filled later through experience. The essay was one of the principal sources of empiricism in modern philosophy, and influenced many enlightenment philosophers, such as David Hume and George Berkeley.


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John Locke photo

“Preference of vice to virtue, a manifest wrong judgment.”

Book II, Ch. 21, sec. 70
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

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“All men are liable to error; and most men are, in many points, by passion or interest, under temptation to it.”

Book IV, Ch. 20, sec. 17
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

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“He that uses his words loosely and unsteadily will either not be minded or not understood.”

Book III, Ch. 10, sec. 31
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

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“It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of the truth.”

Book IV, Ch. 7, sec. 11
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

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“The boundaries of the species, whereby men sort them, are made by men.”

Book III, Ch. 6, sec. 37
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

John Locke photo
John Locke photo

“There cannot any one moral Rule be propos'd, whereof a Man may not justly demand a Reason.”

Book I, Ch. 3, sec. 4
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

John Locke photo
John Locke photo
John Locke photo

“No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.”

Book II, Ch. 1, sec. 19
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

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“New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.”

Dedicatory epistle, as quoted in [Fred R Shapiro, The Yale Book of Quotations, https://books.google.com/books?id=ck6bXqt5shkC, 2006, Yale University Press, 0-300-10798-6, 468]
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

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“Whoever goes beyond this measure of assent, it is plain receives not the truth in the love of it; loves not truth for truth's sake, but for some other bye-end.”

Book IV, Ch. 19 : Of Enthusiasm (Chapter added in the fourth edition).
Variant paraphrase, sometimes cited as a direct quote: 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.
As paraphrased in Peter's Quotations : Ideas for our Time (1979) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 500; also in The Demon-Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark (1994) by Carl Sagan, p. 64
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)
Context: He that would seriously set upon the search of truth, ought in the first place to prepare his mind with a love of it. For he that loves it not, will not take much pains to get it; nor be much concerned when he misses it. There is nobody in the commonwealth of learning who does not profess himself a lover of truth: and there is not a rational creature that would not take it amiss to be thought otherwise of. And yet, for all this, one may truly say, that there are very few lovers of truth, for truth's sake, even amongst those who persuade themselves that they are so. How a man may know whether he be so in earnest, is worth inquiry: and I think there is one unerring mark of it, viz. The not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant. Whoever goes beyond this measure of assent, it is plain receives not the truth in the love of it; loves not truth for truth's sake, but for some other bye-end.

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“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.”

Book IV, Ch. 16, sec. 4
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)
Context: 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. At least, those who have not thoroughly examined to the bottom all their own tenets, must confess they are unfit to prescribe to others; and are unreasonable in imposing that as truth on other men's belief, which they themselves have not searched into, nor weighed the arguments of probability, on which they should receive or reject it. Those who have fairly and truly examined, and are thereby got past doubt in all the doctrines they profess and govern themselves by, would have a juster pretence to require others to follow them: but these are so few in number, and find so little reason to be magisterial in their opinions, that nothing insolent and imperious is to be expected from them: and there is reason to think, that, if men were better instructed themselves, they would be less imposing on others.

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“He that would seriously set upon the search of truth, ought in the first place to prepare his mind with a love of it. For he that loves it not, will not take much pains to get it; nor be much concerned when he misses it.”

Book IV, Ch. 19 : Of Enthusiasm (Chapter added in the fourth edition).
Variant paraphrase, sometimes cited as a direct quote: 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.
As paraphrased in Peter's Quotations : Ideas for our Time (1979) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 500; also in The Demon-Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark (1994) by Carl Sagan, p. 64
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)
Context: He that would seriously set upon the search of truth, ought in the first place to prepare his mind with a love of it. For he that loves it not, will not take much pains to get it; nor be much concerned when he misses it. There is nobody in the commonwealth of learning who does not profess himself a lover of truth: and there is not a rational creature that would not take it amiss to be thought otherwise of. And yet, for all this, one may truly say, that there are very few lovers of truth, for truth's sake, even amongst those who persuade themselves that they are so. How a man may know whether he be so in earnest, is worth inquiry: and I think there is one unerring mark of it, viz. The not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant. Whoever goes beyond this measure of assent, it is plain receives not the truth in the love of it; loves not truth for truth's sake, but for some other bye-end.

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“He that knows anything, knows this, in the first place, that he need not seek long for instances of his ignorance."”

Source: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Book IV, Ch. 3, sec. 22

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“False and doubtful positions, relied upon as unquestionable maxims, keep those who build on them in the dark from truth.”

Book IV, Ch. 7
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)
Context: False and doubtful positions, relied upon as unquestionable maxims, keep those who build on them in the dark from truth. Such are usually the prejudices imbibed from education, party, reverence, fashion, interest, et cetera.

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“I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.”

Book 1, Ch. 3, sec. 3
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)
Variant: The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.

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