Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

John Locke

No man sets himself about anything but upon some view or other which serves him for a reason.

Actions have their preference, not according to the transient pleasure or pain that accompanies or follows them here, but as they serve to secure that perfect durable happiness hereafter.

Our voluntary actions are the precedent causes of good and evil which they draw after them and bring upon us.

We will not, in civility, allow too much sincerity to the professions of most men, but think their actions to be interpreters of their thoughts.

Affectation is an awkward and forced imitation of what should be genuine and easy, wanting the beauty that accompanies what is natural.

Affectation endeavours to correct natural defects, and has always the laudable aim of pleasing, though it always misses it.

They think that whatever is called old must have the decay of time upon it, and truth too were liable to mould and rottenness.

Though the knowledge they have left us be worth our study, yet they exhausted not all its treasures: they left a great deal for the industry and sagacity of after-ages.

The supposition that angels assume bodies need not startle us, since some of the most ancient and most learned fathers seemed to believe that they had bodies.

Superior beings above us, who enjoy perfect happiness, are more steadily determined in their choice of good than we, and yet they are not less happy or less free than we.

It is looked upon as insolence for a man to adhere to his own opinion against the current stream of antiquity.

It is not to be expected that every one should guard his understanding from being imposed on by the sophistry which creeps into most of the books of argument.

The dexterous management of terms, and being able to fend and prove with them, passes for a great part of learning; but it is learning distinct from knowledge.

In arguing, the opponent uses comprehensive and equivocal terms, to involve his adversary in the doubtfulness of his expression, and therefore the answer on his side makes it his play to distinguish as much as he can.

I do not see how they can argue with any one without setting down strict boundaries.

It carries too great an imputation of ignorance, or folly, to quit and renounce former tenets upon the offer of an argument which cannot immediately be answered.

Men of fair minds, and not given up to the overweening of self-flattery, are frequently guilty of it; and in many cases one with amazement hears the arguings, and is astonished at the obstinacy, of a worthy man who yields not to the evidence of reason.

The multiplying variety of arguments, especially frivolous ones, is not only lost labour, but cumbers the memory to no purpose.

Hunting after arguments to make good one side of a question, and wholly to refuse those which favour the other, is so far from giving truth its due value, that it wholly debases it.

An ill argument introduced with deference will procure more credit than the profoundest science with a rough, insolent, and noisy management.

The atheists taken notice of among the ancients are left branded upon the records of history.

By attention ideas are registered in the memory.

Some ideas which have more than once offered themselves to the senses have yet been little taken notice of; the mind being either heedless, as in children, or otherwise employed, as in men.

He will have no more clear ideas of all the operations of his mind, than he will have all the particular ideas of any landscape or clock, who will not turn his eyes to it and with attention heed all the parts of it.

This difference of intention and remission of the mind in thinking every one has experienced in himself.

If we would weigh and keep in our minds what we are considering, that would instruct us when we should, or should not, branch into distinctions.

When the mind has brought itself to attention it will be able to cope with difficulties and master them, and then it may go on roundly.

I have discovered no other way to keep our thoughts close to their business, but by frequent attention and application getting the habit of attention and application.

Whoever backs his tenets with authorities thinks he ought to carry the cause, and is ready to style it impudence in any one who shall stand out.

The constraint of receiving and holding opinions by authority was rightly called imposition.

We cannot expect that any one should readily quit his own opinion and embrace ours, with a blind resignation to an authority which the understanding acknowledges not.

It is conceit rather than understanding if it must be under the restraint of receiving and holding opinions by the authority of anything but their own perceived evidence.

If the opinions of others whom we think well of be a ground of assent, men have reason to be Heathens in Japan, Mahometans in Turkey, Papists in Spain, and Protestants in England.

No writings we need to be solicitous about the meaning of but those that contain truths we are to believe or laws we are to obey: we may be less anxious about the sense of other authors.

We are beholden to judicious writers of all ages for those discoveries and discourses they have left behind them for our instruction.

Aristotle’s large views, acuteness and penetration of thought, and strength of judgment, few have equalled.

Most writers use their words loosely and uncertainly, and do not make plain and clear deductions of words one from another, which were not difficult to do, did they not find it convenient to shelter their ignorance, or obstinacy, under the obscurity of their terms.

If authors cannot be prevailed with to keep close to truth and instruction, by unvaried terms, and plain, unsophisticated arguments, yet it concerns readers not to be imposed on.

Beauty consists of a certain composition of colour and figure, causing delight in the beholder.

Beauty or unbecomingness are of more force to draw or deter imitation than any discourses which can be made to them.

That the holy Scriptures are one of the greatest blessings which God bestows upon the sons of men is generally acknowledged by all who know anything of the value and worth of them.

All that is revealed in Scripture has a consequential necessity of being believed by those to whom it is proposed, because it is of divine authority.

It has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter: it is all pure, all sincere, nothing too much, nothing wanting.

We should compare places of Scripture treating of the same point: thus one part of the sacred text could not fail to give light unto another.

If internal light, or any proposition which we take for inspired, be conformable to the principles of reason or to the word of God, which is attested revelation, reason warrants it.

Any sect whose reasonings, interpretations, and language I have been used to will, of course, make all chime that way; and make another, and perhaps the genuine, meaning of the author seem harsh, strange, and uncouth to me.

One muffled up in the infallibility of his sect will not enter into debate with a person who will question any of those things which to him are sacred.

How ready zeal for interest and party is to charge atheism on those who will not, without examining, submit and blindly follow their nonsense!

Their being forced to their books in an age at enmity with all restraint has been the reason why many have hated books.

He that will inquire out the best books in every science, and inform himself of the most material authors of the several acts of philosophy and religion, will not find it an infinite work to acquaint himself with the sentiments of mankind concerning the most weighty and comprehensive subjects.

Cause is a substance exerting its power into act, to make one thing begin to be.

One series of consequences will not 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.

Some will not venture to look beyond the received notions of the age, nor have so presumptuous a thought as to be wiser than their neighbours.

A small mistake may leave upon the mind the lasting memory of having been taunted for something censurable.

Characters drawn on dust, that the first breath of wind effaces, are altogether as useful as the thoughts of a soul that perish in thinking.

We must not hope wholly to change their original tempers; nor make the gay pensive and grave, nor the melancholy sportive, without spoiling them.

He that is found reasonable in one thing is concluded to be so in all; and to think or say otherwise is thought so unjust an affront, and so senseless a censure, that nobody ventures to do it.

The flexibleness of the former part of a man’s age, not yet grown up to be headstrong, makes it more governable and safe; and in the after-part reason and foresight begin a little to take place, and mind a man of his safety and improvement.

All men ought to maintain peace and the common offices of humanity and friendship in diversity of opinions.

This gamesome humour of children should rather be encouraged, to keep up their spirits and improve their strength and health, than curbed or restrained.

Children should always be heard, and fairly and kindly answered, when they ask after anything they would know, and desire to be informed about. Curiosity should be as carefully cherished in children as other appetites suppressed.

Children are travellers newly arrived in a strange country; we should therefore make conscience not to mislead them.

He that is about children should study their nature and aptitudes: what turns they easily take, and what becomes them; what their native stock is, and what it is fit for.

If a child, when questioned for anything, directly confess, you must commend his ingenuity, and pardon the fault, be it what it will.

To keep him at a distance from falsehood, and cunning, which has always a broad mixture of falsehood,—this is the fittest preparation of a child for wisdom.

When one is sure it will not corrupt or effeminate children’s minds, and make them fond of trifles, I think all things should be contrived to their satisfaction.

I am sure children would be freer from diseases if they were not crammed so much as they are by fond mothers, and were kept wholly from flesh the first three years.

Silly people commend tame, unactive children, because they make no noise, nor give them any trouble.

I would not have children much beaten for their faults, because I would not have them think bodily pain the greatest punishment.

If the mind be curbed and humbled too much in children; if their spirits be abused and broken too much by too strict an hand over them; they lose all their vivacity and industry.

Children, even when they endeavour their utmost, cannot keep their minds from straggling.

If improvement cannot be made a recreation, they must be let loose to the childish play they fancy, which they should be weaned from by being made surfeit of it.

The main thing to be considered in every action of a child is how it will become him when he is bigger, and whither it will lead him when he is grown up.

Christ will bring all to life, and then they shall be put every one upon his own trial, and receive judgment.

I hope it is no derogation to the Christian religion to say that … all that is necessary to be believed in it by all men is easy to be understood by all men.

In nature it is not convenient to consider every difference that is in things, and divide them into distinct classes: this will run us into particulars, and we shall be able to establish no general truth.

Scholiasts, those copious expositors of places, pour out a vain overflow of learning on passages plain and easy.

Let them have ever so learned lectures of breeding, that which will most influence their carriage will be the company they converse with and the fashion of those about them.

He that has confidence to turn his wishes into demands, will be but a little way from thinking he ought to obtain them.

A persuasion that we shall overcome any difficulties that we meet with in the sciences seldom fails to carry us through them.

Person belongs only to intelligent agents, capable of a law, and happiness and misery: this personality extends itself beyond present existence to what is past only by consciousness, whereby it imputes to itself past actions, just upon the same ground that it does the present.

To have countenanced in him irregularity, and disobedience to that light which he had, would have been to have authorized disorder, confusion, and wickedness in his creatures.

It is not to be imagined how far constancy will carry a man; however, it is better walking slowly in a rugged way than to break a leg and be a cripple.

Contemplation is keeping the idea which is brought into the mind, for some time actually in view.

The indolency we have sufficing for our present happiness, we desire not to venture the change; being content; and that is enough.

Consider what the learning of disputation is, and how they are employed for the advantage of themselves or others whose business is only the vain ostentation of sounds.

Amongst men who examine not scrupulously their own ideas, and strip them not from the marks men use for them, but confound them with words, there must be endless dispute.

I am yet apt to think that men find their simple ideas agree, though in discourse they confound one another with different names.

Hunting after arguments to make good one side of a question, and wholly to neglect those which favour the other, is wilfully to misguide the understanding; and is so far from giving truth its due value, that it wholly debases it.

If we consider the mistakes in men’s disputes and notions, how great a part is owing to words, and their uncertain or mistaken significations: this we are the more carefully to be warned of, because the arts of improving it have been made the business of men’s study.

This exactness is absolutely necessary in inquiries after philosophical knowledge, and in controversies about truth.

There is no such way to give defence to absurd doctrines, as to guard them round about with legions of obscure and undefined words; which yet make these retreats more like the dens of robbers, or holes of foxes, than the fortresses of fair warriors.

It happens in controversial discourses as it does in the assaulting of towns, where, if the ground be but firm whereon the batteries are erected, there is no farther enquiry whom it belongs to, so it affords but a fit rise for the present purpose.

A way that men ordinarily use to force others to submit to their judgments, and receive their opinion in debate, is to require the adversary to admit what they allege as a proof, or to assign a better.

Men that do not perversely use their words, or on purpose set themselves to cavil, seldom mistake the signification of the names of simple ideas.

Before a man can speak on any subject it is necessary to be acquainted with it.

He must be little skilled in the world who thinks that men’s talking much or little shall hold proportion only to their knowledge.

Cato Major, who had with great reputation borne all the great offices of the commonwealth, has left us an evidence, under his own hand, how much he was versed in country affairs.

The wisdom and goodness of the Maker plainly appears in the parts of this stupendous fabric, and the several degrees and ranks of creatures in it.

There is not so contemptible a plant or animal that does not confound the most enlarged understanding.

It is suitable to the magnificent harmony of the universe that the species of creatures should, by gentle degrees, ascend upward from us toward his perfection, as we see they gradually descend from us downward.

Is it possible that a promiscuous jumble of printing letter should often fall into a method which should stamp on paper a coherent discourse?

Discourage cunning in a child: cunning is the ape of wisdom.

Nobody was ever so cunning as to conceal their being so; and everybody is shy and distrustful of crafty men.

Curiosity in children nature has provided to remove that ignorance they were born with; which, without this busy inquisitiveness, will make them dull.

One great reason why many children abandon themselves wholly to silly sports, and trifle away all their time insipidly, is because they have found their curiosity baulked.

If their curiosity leads them to ask what they should not know, it is better to tell them plainly that it is a thing that belongs not to them to know, than to pop them off with a falsehood.

Custom, a greater power than nature, seldom fails to make them worship.

Trials wear us into a liking of what possibly, in the first essay, displeased us.

Let him look into the future state of bliss or misery, and see there God, the righteous judge, ready to render every man according to his deeds.

In that great day, wherein the secrets of all hearts shall be laid open, no one shall be made to answer for what he knows nothing of; but shall receive his doom, his conscience accusing or excusing him.

Despair is the thought of the unattainableness of any good, which works differently in men’s minds; sometimes producing uneasiness or pain, sometimes rest and indolency.

If a strict hand be kept over children from the beginning, they will in that age be tractable; and if as they grow up the rigour be, as they deserve it, gently relaxed, former restraints will increase their love.

The backwardness parents show in indulging their faults will make them set a greater value on their credit themselves, and teach them to be the more careful to preserve the good opinion of others.

The rebukes which their faults will make hardly to be avoided should not only be in sober, grave, and impassionate words, but also alone and in private.

If words are sometimes to be used, they ought to be grave, kind, and sober, representing the ill or unbecomingness of the fault.

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes the will supple, it hardens the offender.

We are seldom at ease, and free enough from the solicitation of our natural or adopted desires; but a constant succession of uneasinesses (out of that stock which natural wants or acquired habits have heaped up) take the will in their turns.

Men would often see what a small pittance of reason is mixed with those huffing opinions they are swelled with, with which they are so armed at all points, and with which they so confidently lay about them.

A man brings his mind to be positive and fierce for positions whose evidence he has never examined.

It is a wrong use of my understanding to make it the rule and measure of another man’s; a use which it is neither fit for, nor capable of.

The assuming an authority to dictate to others, and a forwardness to prescribe to their opinions, is a constant concomitant of this bias of our judgments.

In this retirement of the mind from the senses, it retains a yet more incoherent manner of thinking, which we call dreaming.

Dreaming is the having of ideas whilst the outward senses are stopped, not suggested by any external objects, or known occasions, nor under the rule or conduct of the understanding.

Reflect upon the different state of the mind in thinking, which those instances of attention, reverie, and dreaming naturally enough suggest.

People lavish it profusely in tricking up their children in fine clothes, and yet starve their minds.

That we have our notion of succession and duration from this original, viz., from the reflection on the train of ideas which we find to appear one after another in our own minds, seems plain to me, in that we have no perception of duration but by considering the train of ideas that take their turns in our understandings.

One who fixes his thoughts intently on one thing, so as to take but little notice of the succession of ideas in his mind, lets slip out of his account a good part of that duration.

When the succession of ideas cease, our perception of duration ceases with it, which every one experiments whilst he sleeps soundly.

He that from his childhood has made rising betimes familiar to him will not waste the best part of his life in drowsiness and lying a-bed.

I think we may assert that in a hundred men there are more than ninety who are what they are, good or bad, useful or pernicious to society, from the instruction they have received. It is on education that depend the great differences observable among them. The least and most imperceptible impressions received in our infancy have consequences very important, and of a long duration. It is with these first impressions as with a river, whose waters we can easily turn, by different canals, in quite opposite courses; so that from the insensible direction the stream receives at its source, it takes different directions, and at last arrives at places far distant from each other; and with the same facility we may, I think, turn the minds of children to what direction we please.

In learning anything, as little should be proposed to the mind at once as is possible; and that being understood and fully mastered, proceed to the next adjoining, yet unknown, simple, unperplexed proposition belonging to the matter in hand, and tending to the clearing what is principally designed.

Could it be believed that a child should be forced to learn the rudiments of a language which he is never to use, and neglect the writing a good hand, and casting accounts?

Virtue and talents, though allowed their due consideration, yet are not enough to procure a man a welcome wherever he comes. Nobody contents himself with rough diamonds, or wears them so. When polished and set, then they give a lustre.

In education, most time is to be bestowed on that which is of the greatest consequence in the ordinary course and occurrences of that life the young man is designed for.

A child will learn three times as fast when he is in tune, as he will when he is dragged to his task.

The mischiefs that come by inadvertency or ignorance are but very gently to be taken notice of.

To make the sense of esteem or disgrace sink the deeper, and be of the more weight, either agreeable or disagreeable things should constantly accompany these different states.

Education begins the gentleman; but reading, good company, and reflection must finish him.

Enthusiasm, though founded neither on reason nor revelation, but rising from the conceits of a warmed or overweening brain, works more powerfully on the persuasions and actions of men than either or both together.

Let an enthusiast be principled that he or his teacher is inspired, and acted by an immediate communication of the Divine spirit, and you in vain bring the evidence of clear reason against his doctrine.

To be indifferent whether we embrace falsehood or truth is the great road to error.

Ignorance, with indifferency for truth, is nearer to it than opinion with ungrounded inclination, which is the great source of error.

The foundation of error will lie in wrong measures of probability; as the foundation of vice in wrong measures of good.

To a wrong hypothesis may be reduced the errors that may be occasioned by a true hypothesis but not rightly understood: there is nothing more familiar than this.

By repeating any idea of any length of time, as of a minute, a year, or an age, as often as we will in our own thoughts, and adding them to one another, without ever coming to the end of such addition, we come by the idea of eternity.

If to avoid succession in eternal existence they refer to the punctum stans of the schools, they will thereby very little mend the matter, or help us to a more positive idea of infinite duration.

If there remains an eternity to us after the short revolution of time we so swiftly run over here, ’tis clear that all the happiness that can be imagined in this fleeting state is not valuable in respect of the future.

When infinite happiness is put in one scale against infinite misery in the other; if the worst that comes to the pious man if he mistakes be the best that the wicked can attain to if he be in the right, who can, without madness, run the venture?

To him who hath a prospect of the state that attends all men after this, the measures of good and evil are changed.

Being indifferent, we should receive and embrace opinions according as evidence gives the attestation of truth.

Beyond the evidence it carries with it, I advise him not to follow any man’s interpretation.

Reason can never permit the mind to reject a greater evidence to embrace what is less evident, nor allow it to entertain probability in opposition to knowledge and certainty.

If we will rightly estimate what we call good and evil, we shall find it lies much in comparison.

Evil is what is apt to produce or increase any pain, or diminish any pleasure, in us; or else to procure us any evil, or deprive us of any good.

Ill patterns are sure to be followed more than good rules.

A man shall never want crooked paths to walk in, if he thinks that he is in the right way wherever he has the footsteps of others to follow.

No definition, no suppositions of any sect, are of force enough to destroy constant experience.

If eyes so framed could not view at once the hand and the hour-plate, their owner could not be benefited by that acuteness; which whilst it discovered the secret contrivance of the machine made him lose its use.

If an ingenuous detestation of falsehood be but carefully and early instilled, that is the true and genuine method to obviate dishonesty.

However strict a hand is to be kept upon all the desires of fancy, yet in recreation fancy must be permitted to speak.

Men espouse the well-endowed opinions in fashion, and then seek arguments to make good their beauty or varnish over and cover their deformity.

The mind frights itself with anything reflected on in gross, and at a distance: things thus offered to the mind carry the show of nothing but difficulty.

It carries too great an imputation of ignorance, lightness, or folly, for men to quit and renounce their former tenets presently upon the offer of an argument which they cannot immediately answer.

Folly consists in the drawing of false conclusions from just principles, by which it is distinguished from madness, which draws just conclusions from false principles.

It may help put an end to that long-agitated and unreasonable question, Whether man’s will be free or no?

We run into great difficulties about free created agents, which reason cannot well extricate itself out.

If the ideas of liberty and volition were carried along with us in our minds, a great part of the difficulties that perplex men’s thoughts would be easier resolved.

To ask, Whether the will has freedom? is to ask, Whether one power has another? A question too absurd to need an answer.

The forbearance of that action, consequent to such command of the mind, is called voluntary, and whatsoever action is performed without such a thought of the mind is called involuntary.

We are far from any necessary determination of our will to any particular action, and from a necessary compliance with our desire set upon any particular, and then appearing preferable, good.

This is the hinge on which turns the liberty of intellectual beings in their steady prosecution of true felicity, that they can suspend this prosecution in particular cases, till they have looked before them.

We have a power to suspend the prosecution of this or that desire: this seems to me the source of all liberty; in this seems to consist that which is improperly called free will.

In respect of actions within the reach of such a power in him, a man seems as free as it is possible for freedom to make him.

Is it worth the name of freedom to be at liberty to play the fool and draw shame and misery upon a man’s self?

Objects near our view are apt to be thought greater than those of a larger size that are more remote; and so it is with pleasure and pain: the present is apt to carry it, and those at a distance have the disadvantage in the comparison.

To him who hath a prospect of the different state of perfect happiness or misery that attends all men after this life, the measures of good and evil are mightily changed.

Profitable employments would be no less a diversion than any of the idle sports in fashion, if men could but be brought to delight in them.

As to cards and dice, I think the safest and best way is never to learn to play upon them, and so be incapacitated for those dangerous temptations and encroaching wasters of time.

Gardening or husbandry, and working in wood, are fit and healthy recreations for a man of study or business.

Education begins the gentleman, but reading, good company, and reflection must finish him.

Tender minds should not receive early impressions of goblins, spectres, and apparitions.

There is no truth which a man may more evidently make out to himself than the existence of a God; yet he that shall content himself with things as they minister to our pleasures and passions, and not make enquiry a little further into their causes and ends, may live long without any notion of such a being.

Though God has given us no innate ideas of himself, though he has stamped no original characters on our minds wherein we may read his being; yet, having furnished us with those faculties our minds are endowed with, he hath not left himself without witness.

Our own being furnishes us with an evident and incontestable proof of a Deity; and I believe nobody can avoid the cogency of it who will carefully attend to it.

I think it unavoidable for every rational creature, that will examine his own or any other existence, to have the notion of an eternal, wise being, who had no beginning.

Serving to give us due sentiments of the wisdom and goodness of the sovereign Disposer of all things.

If we will rightly estimate what we call good and evil, we shall find it lies much in comparison.

Good is what is apt to cause or increase pleasure or diminish pain in us; or else to procure or preserve us in the possession of any other good, or absence of any evil.

All absent good does not, according to the greatness it has, or is acknowledged to have, cause pain equal to that greatness, as all pain causes desire equal to itself; because the absence of good is not always a pain, as the presence of pain is.

Were every action concluded within itself, and drew no consequences after it, we should, undoubtedly, never err in our choice of good.

The infinitely greatest confessed good is neglected to satisfy the successive uneasiness of our desires pursuing trifles.

Civil government is the proper remedy for the inconveniences of a state of nature.

Self-love will make men partial to themselves and friends, and ill-nature, passion, and revenge will carry them too far in punishing others; and therefore God hath certainly appointed government to restrain the partiality and violence of men.

Their consciences oblige them to submit to that dominion which their governors had a right to exercise over them.

Men may put government into what hands they please.

We must know how the first ruler, from whom any one claims, came by his authority, before we can know who has a right to succeed him in it.

The nature and office of justice being to dispose the mind to a constant and perpetual readiness to render to every man his due, it is evident that if gratitude be a part of justice, it must be conversant about something that is due to another.

A little bitter mingled in our cup leaves no relish of the sweet.

Whosoever introduces habits in children deserves the care and attention of their governors.

Happiness, in its full extent, is the utmost pleasure we are capable of, and misery the utmost pain.

The indolency and enjoyment we have sufficing for our present happiness, we desire not to venture the change, being content; and that is enough.

That in this state of ignorance we short-sighted creatures might not mistake true felicity, we are endowed with a power to suspend any particular desire. This is standing still where we are not sufficiently assured.

The stronger ties we have to an unalterable pursuit of happiness, which is greatest good, the more are we free from any necessary compliance with our desire set upon any particular and then appearing preferable good, till we have duly examined it.

Whatever necessity determines to the pursuit of real bliss, the same necessity establishes suspense, and scrutiny of each successive desire, whether the satisfaction of it does not interfere with our true happiness, and mislead us from it.

As to present happiness and misery, when that alone comes in consideration, and the consequences are removed, a man never chooses amiss.

Our desires carry the mind out to absent good, according to the necessity which we think there is of it to the making or increase of our happiness.

It is easy to give account how it comes to pass that though all men desire happiness, yet their wills carry them so contrarily.

A sound mind in a sound body is a short but full description of a happy state in this world: he that has these two has little more to wish for, and he that wants either of them will be but little the better for anything else.

Happiness and misery are the names of two extremes, the utmost bounds whereof we know not.

The variety and contrary choices that men make in the world argue that the same thing is not good to every man alike: this variety of pursuits shows that every one does not place his happiness in the same thing.

One reason why God hath scattered up and down several degrees of pleasure and pain in all the things that environ and affect us, and blended them together in almost all that our senses have to do with, is, that we, finding imperfection, dissatisfaction, and want of complete happiness in all the enjoyments which the creatures can afford us, might be led to seek it in the enjoyment of Him with whom “there is fulness of joy, and at whose right hand there are pleasures for evermore.”

Every one is full of the miracles done by cold baths on decayed and weak constitutions.

Gardening, or husbandry, and working in wood are healthy recreations.

If by gaining knowledge we destroy our health, we labour for a thing that will be useless in our hands; and if by harassing our bodies (though with a design to render ourselves more useful) we deprive ourselves of the abilities and opportunities of doing that good we might have done with a meaner talent, which God thought sufficient for us, by having denied us the strength to improve it to that pitch which men of stronger constitutions can attain to, we rob God of so much service, and our neighbour of all that help which in a state of health, with moderate knowledge, we might have been able to perform. He that sinks his vessel by overloading it, though it be with gold and silver and precious stones, will give his owner but an ill account of his voyage.

In the Hebrew tongue there is a particle, consisting of one single letter, of which there are reckoned up above fifty several significations.

The custom and familiarity of these tongues do sometimes so far influence the expressions in these epistles that one may observe the force of the Hebrew conjugations.

The stories of Alexander and Cæsar, farther than they instruct us in the art of living well and furnish us with observations of wisdom and prudence, are not one jot to be preferred to the history of Robin Hood or the Seven Wise Masters. I do not deny but history is very useful, and very instructive of human life; but if it be studied only for the reputation of being a historian, it is a very empty thing; and he that can tell all the particulars of Herodotus and Plutarch, Curtius and Livy, without making any other use of them, may be an ignorant man with a good memory, and with all his pains hath only filled his head with Christmas tales. And, which is worse, the greatest part of history being made up of wars and conquests, and their style, especially the Romans, speaking of valour as the chief if not the only virtue, we are in danger to be misled by the general current and business of history; and, looking on Alexander and Cæsar, and such like heroes, as the highest instances of human greatness, because they each of them caused the death of several hundred thousand men, and the ruin of a much greater number, overran a great part of the earth, and killed the inhabitants to possess themselves of their countries, we are apt to make butchery and rapine the chief marks and very essence of human greatness.

When the Spirit brings light into our minds, it dispels darkness: we see it as we do that of the sun at noon, and need not the twilight of reason to show it.

The safest way to secure honesty is to lay the foundations of it early in liberality, and an easiness to part with to others whatever they have or like themselves.

Hope is that pleasure of the mind which every one finds in himself upon the thought of a probable future enjoyment of a thing which is apt to delight him.

For ideas, in my sense of the word, are whatsoever is the object of the understanding, when a man thinks; or whatsoever it is the mind can be employed about in thinking.

Whatsoever the mind perceives in itself, or is the immediate object of perception, thought, or understanding, that I call idea.

Simple ideas, the materials of all our knowledge, are suggested to the mind only by sensation and reflection.

These simple ideas the understanding can no more refuse to have, or alter, or blot them out, than a mirror can refuse, alter, or obliterate the images which the objects set before it produce.

External material things, as the objects of sensation; and the operations of our minds within, as the objects of reflection; are the only originals from whence all our ideas take their beginning.

If ideas be not innate, there was a time when the mind was without those principles; for where the ideas are not, there can be no knowledge, no assent, no mental or verbal propositions about them.

Ideas, as ranked under names, are those that, for the most part, men reason of within themselves, and always those which they commune about with others.

It suffices to the unity of any idea that it be considered as one representation or picture; though made up of ever so many particulars.

Since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that that makes every one to be what he calls self, and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking beings, in this alone consists personal identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational being.

The identity of the same man consists in nothing but a participation of the same continued life by constantly fleeting particles of matter in succession vitally united to the same organized body.

If we take away consciousness of pleasure and pain, it will he hard to know wherein to place personal identity.

Children generally hate to be idle; all the care then is, that their busy humour should be constantly employed in something of use to them.

Things reflected on in gross and transiently carry the show of nothing but difficulty in them, and are thought to be wrapt up in impenetrable obscurity.

Thousands of things which now either wholly escape our apprehensions, or which our short-sighted reason having got some faint glimpse of, we, in the dark, grope after.

There is not so contemptible a plant or animal that does not confound the most enlarged understanding.

From the very first instances of perception some things are grateful and others unwelcome to them; some things that they incline to, and others that they fly.

To attempt the putting another genius upon him will be labour in vain; and what is plaistered on will have always hanging to it the ungracefulness of constraint.

When we voluntarily waste much of our lives, that remissness can by no means consist with a constant determination of will or desire to the greatest apparent good.

When the mind has been once habituated to this lazy recumbency and satisfaction on the obvious surface of things, it is in danger to rest satisfied there.

If men were weaned from their sauntering humour, wherein they let a good part of their lives run uselessly away, they would acquire skill in hundreds of things.

He that thinks he has a positive idea of infinite space will find that he can no more have a positive idea of the greatest than he has of the least space; for in this latter we are capable only of a comparative idea of smallness, which will always be less than any one whereof we have the positive idea.

When the mind pursues the idea of infinity, it uses the ideas and repetition of numbers, which are so many distinct ideas, kept beset by number from running into a confused heap, wherein the mind loses itself.

Collect into one sum as great a number as you please, this multitude, how great soever, lessens not one jot of the power of adding to it, or brings him any nearer the end of the inexhaustible stock of number.

What lies beyond our positive idea towards infinity lies in obscurity, and has the undeterminate confusion of a negative idea.

These men are of the mind that they have clearer ideas of infinite duration than of infinite space, because God has existed from all eternity; but there is no real matter co-extended with infinite space.

Some people in America counted their years by the coming of certain birds amongst them at their certain seasons, and leaving them at others.

Birds learning tunes, and their endeavours to hit the notes right, put it past doubt that they have perception, and retain ideas, and use them for patterns.

If we consider children, we have little reason to think that they bring many ideas with them, bating, perhaps, some faint ideas of hunger and thirst.

Sometimes the mind perceives the agreement or disagreement of two ideas immediately by themselves, without the intervention of any other; and this, I think, we may call intuitive knowledge.

Intuitive knowledge needs no probation, nor can have any, this being the highest of all human certainty.

Joy is a delight of the mind, from the consideration of the present or assured approaching possession of a good.

The faculty which God has given man to supply the want of certain knowledge is judgment, whereby the mind takes any proposition to be true or false without perceiving a demonstrative evidence in the proofs.

Judging is balancing an account and determining on which side the odds lie.

Every man is put under a necessity, by his constitution, as an intelligent being, to be determined by his own judgment what is best for him to do; else he would be under the determination of some other than himself, which is want of liberty.

He that judges, without informing himself to the utmost that he is capable, cannot acquit himself of judging amiss.

A perfect indifferency in the mind, not determinable by its last judgment, would be as great an imperfection as the want of indifferency to act, or not to act, till determined by the will.

Where the mind does not perceive connection, there men’s opinions are not the product of judgment, but the effects of chance and hazard, of a mind floating at all adventures, without choice and without direction.

That our understandings may be free to examine, and reason unbiassed give its judgment, being that whereon a right direction of our conduct to true happiness depends: it is in this we should employ our chief care.

The wrong judgment that misleads us, and makes the will often fasten on the worst side, lies in misreporting upon the various comparisons of these.

That mistake which is the consequence of invincible error scarce deserves the name of wrong judgment.

If God, by his revealed declaration, first gave rule to any man, he that will claim by that title must have the same positive grant of God for his succession; for, if it has not directed the course of its descent and conveyance, no body can succeed to this title of the first ruler.

The knowledge we acquire in this world I am apt to think extends not beyond the limits of this life. The beatific vision of the other life needs not the help of this dim twilight; but, be that as it will, I am sure the principal end why we are to get knowledge here, is to make use of it for the benefit of ourselves and others in this world; but if by gaining it we destroy our health, we labour for a thing that will be useless in our hands; and if by harassing our bodies (though with a design to render ourselves more useful) we deprive ourselves of the abilities and opportunities of doing that good we might have done with a meaner talent, which God thought sufficient for us, by having denied us the strength to improve it to that pitch which men of stronger constitutions can attain to, we rob God of so much service, and our neighbour of all that help which in a state of health, with moderate knowledge, we might have been able to perform. He that sinks his vessel by overloading it, though it be with gold and silver and precious stones, will give his owner but an ill account of his voyage.

Knowledge, which is the highest degree of the speculative faculties, consists in the perception of the truth of affirmative or negative propositions.

Outward objects, that are extrinsical to the mind; and its own operations, proceeding from powers intrinsical, and proper to itself, which, when reflected on by itself, become also objects of its contemplation, are the original of all knowledge.

Getting and improving our knowledge in substances only by experience and history is all that the weakness of our faculties in this state of mediocrity, while we are in this world, can attain to.

They who would advance in knowledge should lay down this as a fundamental rule, not to take words for things.

It will be an unpardonable as well as childish peevishness if we undervalue the advantages of our knowledge, and neglect to improve it.

Others despond at the first difficulty, and conclude that making any progress in knowledge farther than serves their ordinary business is above their capacities.

God, having endowed man with faculties of knowing, was no more obliged to implant those innate notions in his mind, than that, having given him reason, hands, and material, he should build him bridges.

The knowledge of things alone gives a value to our reasonings, and preference of one man’s knowledge over another’s.

The contempt of all other knowledge, as if it were nothing in comparison of law or physic, of astrology or chemistry, coops the understanding up within narrow bounds, and hinders it from looking abroad into other provinces of the intellectual world.

So much as we ourselves comprehend of truth and reason, so much we possess of real and true knowledge. The floating of other men’s opinions in our brains makes us not one jot the more knowing though they happen to be true: what in them was science is in us but opiniatrety.

To have knowledge in all the objects of contemplation is what the mind can hardly attain unto; the instances are few of those who have in any measure approached towards it.

If there be a sober and a wise man, what difference will there be between his knowledge and that of the most extravagant fancy in the world? If there be any difference between them, the advantage will be on the warm-headed man’s side, as having the more ideas, and the more lively.

God, when he gave the world in common to all mankind, commanded man also to labour; and the penury of his condition required it.

The great men among the ancients understood how to reconcile manual labour with affairs of state.

If we rightly estimate things, what in them is purely owing to nature, and what to labour, we shall find ninety-nine parts of a hundred are wholly to be put on the account of labour.

The greatest part of mankind are given up to labour, whose lives are worn out only in the provisions for living.

The chief, if not only, spur to human industry and action is uneasiness.

He that thinks that diversion may not lie in hard labour forgets the early rising and hard riding of huntsmen.

God, having designed man for a sociable creature, made him not only with an inclination and under the necessity to have fellowship with those of his own kind, but furnished him also with language, which was to be the great instrument and cementer of society.

Language being the conduit whereby men convey their knowledge, he that makes an ill use of it, though he does not corrupt the fountains of knowledge, which are in things, yet he stops the pipes.

Languages are to be learned only by reading and talking, and not by scraps of authors got by heart.

Particularly in learning of languages there is least occasion for posing of children.

The learning and mastery of a tongue, being uneasy and unpleasant enough in itself, should not be cumbered with any other difficulties, as is done in this way of proceeding.

It is fruitless pains to learn a language which one may guess by his temper he will wholly neglect as soon as an approach to manhood, setting him free from a governor, shall put him into the hands of his own inclination.

I would have any one name to me that tongue that one can speak as he should do by the rules of grammar.

If a gentleman be to study any language, it ought to be that of his own country.

Men apply themselves to two or three foreign, dead, and which are called the learned, languages, and pique themselves upon their skill in them.

The polity of some of our neighbours hath not thought it beneath the public care to promote and reward the improvement of their own language.

No care is taken to improve young men in their own language, that they may thoroughly understand and be masters of it.

Those who cannot distinguish, compare, and abstract would hardly be able to understand and make use of language, or judge or reason to any tolerable degree.

Now that languages are made, and abound with words standing for combinations, an usual way of getting these complete ideas is by the explication of those terms that stand for them.

Use, which is the supreme law in matter of language, has determined that heresy relates to errors in faith, and schism to those in worship or discipline.

There is a law of nature, as intelligible to a rational creature and studier of that law, as the positive laws of commonwealths.

Civil law and history are studies which a gentleman should not barely touch at, but constantly dwell upon.

The chief art of learning is to attempt but little at a time.

Till a man can judge whether they be truths or no, his understanding is but little improved: and thus men of much reading are greatly learned but may be little knowing.

His understanding is only the warehouse of other men’s lumber, I mean false and unconcluding reasonings, rather than a repository of truth for his own use.

As it is in the motions of the body, so it is in the thoughts of our minds: where any one is such that we have power to take it up, or lay it by, according to the preference of the mind, there we are at liberty.

Though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of license; though man in that state have an uncontrollable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, yet he has not liberty to destroy himself.

If the neglect or abuse of liberty to examine what would really and truly make for his happiness mislead him, the miscarriages that follow on it must be imputed to his own election.

If to break loose from the conduct of reason, and to want that restraint of examination and judgment which keeps us from choosing or doing the worst, be liberty, true liberty, madmen and fools are the only freemen.

The constant desire of happiness, and the constraint it puts upon us, nobody (I think) accounts an abridgment of liberty; or at least an abridgment of liberty to be complained of.

That such a temporary life as we now have is better than no being, is evident by the high value we put upon it ourselves.

When we voluntarily waste much of our lives, that remissness can by no means consist with a constant determination of will or desire to the greatest apparent good.

A very little part of our life is so vacant from uneasiness as to leave us free to the attraction of remoter good.

This life is a scene of vanity, that soon passes away and affords no solid satisfaction but in the consciousness of doing well, and in the hopes of another life: this is what I can say upon experience, and what you will find to be true when you come to make up the account.

He that knows how to make those he converses with easy, has found the true art of living, and being welcome and valued everywhere.

A man knows first, and then he is able to prove syllogistically; so that syllogism comes after knowledge, when a man has no need of it.

I find that laying the intermediate ideas naked in their due order shows the incoherence of the argumentations better than syllogisms.

Reason by its own penetration, where it is strong and exercised, usually sees quicker and clearer without syllogism.

The syllogistical form only shows, that if the intermediate idea agrees with those it is on both sides immediately applied to, then those two remote ones, or, as they are called, extremes, do certainly agree.

A man unskilful in syllogism, at first hearing, could perceive the weakness and inconclusiveness of a long, artificial, and plausible discourse, wherewith some others, better skilled in syllogism, have been misled.

He that will look into many parts of Asia and America will find men reason there perhaps as acutely as himself, who yet never heard of a syllogism.

Syllogism is of necessary use, even to the lovers of truth, to show them the fallacies that are often concealed in florid, witty, or involved discourses.

If ideas and words were distinctly weighed and duly considered, they would afford us another sort of logic and critic than what we have been hitherto acquainted with.

Those that are not men of art, not knowing the true forms of syllogism, cannot know whether they are made in right and conclusive modes and figures.

However it be in knowledge, I may truly say it is of no use at all in probabilities; for the assent there being to be determined by the preponderancy, after a due weighing of all the proofs on both sides, nothing is so unfit to assist the mind in that as syllogism.

General observations drawn from particulars are the jewels of knowledge, comprehending great store in a little room; but they are therefore to be made with the greater care and caution, lest, if we take counterfeit for true, our shame be the greater when our stock comes to a severe scrutiny.

Though they are not self-evident principles, yet what may be made out from them by a wary deduction may be depended upon as certain and infallible truths.

To love our neighbour as ourself is such a fundamental truth for regulating human society, that by that alone one might determine all the cases in social morality.

Tell a man passionately in love that he is jilted, bring a score of witnesses of the falsehood of his mistress, and it is ten to one but three kind words of hers shall invalidate all their testimonies.

It is a contradiction to suppose that whole nations of men should unanimously give the lie to what, by the most invincible evidence, every one of them knew to be true.

Men will give their own experience the lie rather than admit of anything disagreeing with these tenets.

When first found in a lie, talk to him of it as a strange, monstrous matter, and so shame him out of it.

A combination of the ideas of a certain figure, with the powers of motion and reasoning joined to substance, make the ordinary idea of a man.

The great difference in the motions of mankind is from the different use they put their faculties to.

Nothing can cure this part of ill breeding but change and variety of company, and that of persons above us.

This part should be the governor’s principal care: that an habitual gracefulness and politeness in all his carriage may be settled in his charge, as much as may be, before he goes out of his hands.

If their minds are well principled with inward civility, a great part of the roughness which sticks to the outside for want of better teaching, time and observation will rub off; but if ill, all the rules in the world will not polish them.

Plain and rough nature, left to itself, is much better than an artificial ungracefulness, and such studied ways of being ill-fashioned.

Courage in an ill-bred man has the air, and escapes not the opinion, of brutality; learning becomes pedantry, and wit buffoonery.

A natural roughness makes a man uncomplaisant to others; so that he has no deference for their inclinations, tempers, or conditions.

A solicitous watchfulness about one’s behaviour, instead of being mended, it will be constrained, uneasy, and ungraceful.

Defect in our behaviour, coming short of the utmost gracefulness, often escapes our observation.

Kind words prevent a good deal of that perverseness which rough and imperious usage often produces in generous minds.

Mr. [Sir Isaac] Newton has demonstrated several new propositions which are so many new truths, and are further advances in mathematical knowledge.

He that will improve every matter of fact into a maxim will abound in contrary observations, that can be of no other use but to perplex and pudder him.

Where we use words of a loose and wandering signification, hence follows mistake and error, which those maxims brought as proofs to establish propositions wherein the words stand for undetermined ideas, do by their authority confirm and rivet.

If speculative maxims have not an active universal assent from all mankind, practical principles come short of an universal reception.

A man used to such sort of reflections sees as much at one glimpse as would require a long discourse to lay before another and make out in one entire and gradual deduction.

Ideas quickly fade, and often vanish quite out of the understanding, leaving no more footsteps or remaining characters of themselves than shadows do flying over a field of corn…. The memory of some men is very tenacious, even to a miracle; but yet there seems to be a constant decay of all our ideas, even of those which are struck deepest, and in minds the most retentive; so that if they be not sometimes renewed by repeated exercise of the senses, or reflection on those kind of objects which at first occasioned them, the print wears out, and at last there remains nothing to be seen.

Pictures drawn in our minds are laid in fading colours, and, unless sometimes refreshed, vanish and disappear. How much the constitution of our bodies and the make of our animal spirits are concerned in this, and whether the temper of the brain make this difference, that in some it retains the characters drawn on it like marble, in others like freestone, and in others little better than sand, I shall not here inquire: though it may seem probable that the constitution of the body does sometimes influence the memory; since we oftentimes find a disease quite strip the mind of all its ideas, and the flames of a fever in a few days calcine all those images to dust and confusion which seemed to be as lasting as if graved in marble.

Memory is the power to revive again in our minds those ideas which after imprinting have disappeared, or have been laid aside out of sight.

Ideas are imprinted on the memory, some by an object affecting the senses only; others, that have more than once offered themselves, have yet been little taken notice of; the mind, intent only on one thing, not settling the stamp deep into itself.

In viewing again the ideas that are lodged in the memory the mind is more than passive.

By the assistance of this faculty we have all those ideas in our understandings which, though we do not actually contemplate, yet we can bring in sight and make appear again, and be the objects of our thoughts.

That the soul in a sleeping man should be this moment busy thinking, and the next moment in a waking man not remember those thoughts, would need some better proof than bare assertion to make it be believed.

The chiming of some particular words in the memory, and making a noise in the head, seldom happens but when the mind is lazy, or very loosely or negligently employed.

Figured and metaphorical expressions do well to illustrate more abstruse and unfamiliar ideas, which the mind is not yet thoroughly accustomed to.

Accustomed to retired speculations, they run natural philosophy into metaphysical notions.

There are not more differences in men’s faces, and the outward lineaments of their bodies, than there are in the makes and tempers of their minds; only there is this difference, that the distinguishing characters of the face, and the lineaments of the body, grow more plain with time, but the peculiar physiognomy of the mind is most discernible in children.

Whatever ideas the mind can receive and contemplate without the help of the body, it can retain without the help of the body too; or else the soul, or any separate spirit, will have but little advantage by thinking.

The mind by being engaged in a task beyond its strength, like the body strained by lifting at a weight too heavy, has often its force broken, and thereby gets an unaptness or an aversion to any vigorous attempt ever after.

He that procures his child a good mind makes a better purchase for him than if he laid out the money for an addition to his former acres.

The mind upon the suggestion of any new notion runs after similes to make it the clearer to itself; which, though it may be useful in explaining our thoughts to others, is no right method to settle true notions in ourselves.

When men are grown up, and reflect on their own minds, they cannot find anything more ancient there than those opinions which were taught them before their memory began to keep a register of their actions.

The true ground of morality can only be the will and law of a God who sees men in the dark, has in his hands rewards and punishments, and power enough to call to account the proudest offender.

Moral principles require reasoning and discourse to discover the certainty of their truths: they lie not open as natural characters engraven on the mind.

I cannot see how any men should ever transgress those moral rules with confidence and serenity.

I have amongst men of parts and business seldom heard any one commended for having an excellency in music.

Names must be of very unsteady meaning if the ideas be referred to standards without us that cannot be known at all, or but very imperfectly or uncertainly. That which makes doubtfulness and uncertainty in the signification of some more than other words, is the difference of ideas they stand for.

He that has complex ideas, without particular names for them, would be in no better case than a bookseller who had volumes that lay unbound and without titles, which he could make known to others only by showing the loose sheets.

The existence of God is so many ways manifest, and the obedience we owe him so congruous to the light of reason, that a great part of mankind give testimony to the law of nature.

The works of nature and the works of revelation display religion to mankind in characters so large and visible that those who are not quite blind may in them see and read the first principles and most necessary parts of it, and from thence penetrate into those infinite depths filled with the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

A man can no more justly make use of another’s necessity than he that has more strength can seize upon a weaker, master him to his obedience, and, with a dagger at his throat, offer him death or slavery.

Accustom him to make judgment of men by their inside, which often shows itself in little things, when they are not in parade, and upon their guard.

Firmness or stiffness of the mind is not from adherence to truth, but submission to prejudice.

Where the mind does not perceive probable connection, there men’s opinions are the effects of chance and hazard; of a mind floating at all adventures, without choice and without direction.

The names of the figures that embellished the discourses of those that understood the art of speaking are not the art and skill of speaking well.

God hath scattered several degrees of pleasure and pain in all the things that environ and affect us, and blended them together in almost all our thoughts.

When their displeasure is once declared, they ought not presently to lay by the severity of their brows, but restore their children to their former grace with some difficulty.

The severity of the father’s brow whilst they are under the discipline of pupilage, should be relaxed as fast as their age, discretion, and good behaviour allow.

As there is a partiality to opinions, which is apt to mislead the understanding, so there is also a partiality to studies, which is prejudicial to knowledge.

Matters recommended by our passions take possession of our minds, and will not be kept out.

Of the passions, and how they are moved, Aristotle, in his second book of rhetoric, bath admirably discoursed in a little compass.

Perception is only a special kind of knowledge, and sensation a special kind of feeling…. Knowledge and feeling, perception and sensation, though always co-existent, are always in the inverse ratio of each other.

In philosophical enquiries the order of nature should govern, which in all progression is to go from the place one is then in to that which lies next to it.

The systems of natural philosophy that have obtained are to be read more to know the hypotheses, than with hopes to gain there a comprehensive, scientifical, and satisfactory knowledge of the works of nature.

The philosophers of old did in vain enquire, whether the summum bonum consisted in riches, bodily delights, virtue, or contemplation: they might as reasonably have disputed whether the best relish were in apples, plums, or nuts.

All our simple ideas are adequate; because, being nothing but the effects of certain powers in things, fitted and ordained by God to produce such sensations in us, they cannot but be correspondent and adequate to those powers.

Malebranche having shewed the difficulties of the other ways, and how unsufficient they are to give a satisfactory account of the ideas we have, erects this, of seeing all things in God, upon their ruin, as the tree.

This seeing all things, because we can desire to see all things, Malebranche makes a proof that they are present to our minds; and if they be present, they can no ways be present but by the presence of God, who contains them all.

He who, with Plato, shall place beatitude in the knowledge of God, will have his thoughts raised to other contemplations than those who looked not beyond this spot of earth and those perishing things in it.

Were it my business to understand physic, would not the safe way be to consult nature herself in the history of diseases and their cures, than espouse the principles of the dogmatists, methodists, or chymists?

The distinguishing characters of the face, and the lineaments of the body, grow more plain and visible with time and age; but the peculiar physiognomy of the mind is most discernible in children.

It has pleased our wise Creator to annex to several objects, as also to several of our thoughts, a concomitant pleasure; and that in several objects, to several degrees.

Pleasure and pain are only different constitutions of the mind, sometimes occasioned by disorders in the body, or sometimes by thoughts in the mind.

It is a mistake to think that men cannot change the displeasingness or indifferency that is in actions, into pleasure and desire, if they will but do what is in their power.

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.

Political power I take to be a right of making laws with penalties; and of employing the force of the community in the execution of such laws, and in the defence of the common wealth; and all this only for the public good.

Power founded on contract can descend only to him who has right by that contract.

Intelligible discourses are spoiled by too much subtilty in nice divisions.

Who will be prevailed with to dissolve himself at once of all his old opinions, and pretences to knowledge and learning, and turn himself over stark naked in quest afresh of new notions?

The lifting of a man’s self up in his own opinion has had the credit, in former ages, to be thought the lowest degradation that human nature could well sink itself to.

The principles which all mankind allow for true are innate; those that men of right reason admit are the principles allowed by all mankind.

Probability is the appearance of the agreement or disagreement of two ideas by the intervention of proofs whose connection is not constant, but appears for the most part to be so.

The mind ought to examine all the grounds of probability, and, upon a due balancing the whole, reject or receive it proportionably to the preponderancy of the greater grounds of probability on the one side or the other.

Prudence and good-breeding are in all stations necessary; and most young men suffer in the want of them.

He that has ever so little examined the citations of writers cannot doubt how little credit the quotations deserve where the originals are wanting.

A small mistake may leave upon the mind the lasting memory of having been piquantly, though wittily, taunted.

Those who have read of everything are thought to understand everything too; but it is not always so. Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge: it is thinking that 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 and over again they will not give us strength and nourishment.

Education begins the gentleman, but reading, good company, and reflection must finish him.

Reason, in the English language, is sometimes taken for true and clear principle; sometimes for clear and fair deductions; sometimes for the cause, particularly the final cause.

In a creature whose thoughts are more than the sands, and wider than the ocean, fancy and passion must needs run him into strange courses, if reason, which is his only star and compass, be not that he steers by.

The great men among the ancients understood how to reconcile manual labour with affairs of state, and thought it no lessening to their dignity to make the one the recreation to the other.

He that will make a good use of any part of his life must allow a large portion of it to recreation.

Another fruit from the considering things in themselves abstract from our opinions and other men’s notions and discourses on them, will be, that each man will pursue his thoughts in that method which will be most agreeable to the nature of the thing, and to his apprehension of what it suggests to him.

He that will allow exquisite and endless happiness to be but the possible consequence of a good life here, and the contrary state the possible reward of a bad one, must own himself to judge very much amiss if he does not conclude that a virtuous life, with the certain expectation of everlasting bliss which may come, is to be preferred to a vicious one, with the fear of that dreadful state of misery which it is very possible may overtake the guilty, or at best the terrible uncertain hope of annihilation. This is evidently so, though the virtuous life here had nothing but pain, and the vicious, continual pleasure; which yet is for the most part quite otherwise, and wicked men have not much the odds to brag of, even in their present possession: nay, all things rightly considered, have, I think, the worst part here. But when infinite happiness is put in one scale against infinite misery in the other,—if the worst that comes to the pious man, if he mistakes, be the best that the wicked attain to, if he be in the right,—who can without madness run the venture? Who in his wits would choose to come within a possibility of infinite misery, which if he miss there is yet nothing to be got by that hazard? Whereas, on the other side, the sober man ventures nothing against infinite happiness to be got, if his expectation comes to pass. If the good man be in the right, he is eternally happy; if he mistakes, he is not miserable; he feels nothing. On the other side, if the wicked be in the right, he is not happy; if he mistakes, he is infinitely miserable. Must it not be a most wrong judgment that does not presently see to which side in this case the preference is to be given?

This oblation of a heart fixed with dependence on, and affection to, him, is the most acceptable tribute we can pay him, the foundation of true devotion and life of all religion.

They have been taught rhetoric, but never taught language; as if the names of the figures that embellished the discourse of those who understood the art of speaking were the very art and skill of speaking well.

All the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment.

Riches do not consist in having more gold and silver, but in having more in proportion, than our neighbours.

To watch occasions to correct others in their discourse, and not slip any opportunity of showing their talents, scholars are most blamed for.

If words are sometimes to be used, they ought to be grave, kind, and sober, representing the ill or unbecomingness of the faults, rather than a hasty rating of the child for it.

Passionate chiding carries rough language with it, and the names that parents and preceptors give children, they will not be ashamed to bestow on others.

In the want and ignorance of almost all things, they looked upon themselves as the happiest and wisest people of the universe.

Every one, if he would look into himself, would find some defect of his particular genius.

It is by the consciousness it has of its present thoughts and actions, that it is self to itself now, and so will be the same self as far as the same consciousness can extend to actions past or to come.

It is unreasonable for men to be judges in their own cases: self-love will make men partial to themselves and their friends.

Since there appears not to be any ideas in the mind before the senses have conveyed any in, I conceive that ideas in the understanding are coeval with sensation.

Men have fewer or more simple ideas from without, according as the objects they converse with afford greater or less variety.

Inability will every one find in himself who shall go about to fashion in his understanding any simple idea, not received by his senses from external objects, or by reflection from the operations of his mind about them.

The great business of the senses being to make us take notice of what hurts or advantages the body, it is wisely ordered by nature that pain should accompany the reception of several ideas.

Were our senses altered, and made much quicker and acuter, the appearance and outward scheme of things would have quite another face to us, and be inconsistent with our well-being.

Imperiousness and severity is but an ill way of treating men who have reason of their own to guide them.

Severity carried to the highest pitch breaks the mind; and then in the place of a disorderly young fellow you have a low-spirited moped creature.

Command and force may often create, but can never cure, an aversion; and whatever any one is brought to by compulsion, he will leave as soon as he can.

Recollect what disorder hasty or imperious words from parents or teachers have caused in his thoughts.

Ingenuous shame and the apprehensions of displeasure are the only true restraints: these alone ought to hold the reins, and keep the child in order.

A man, not having the power of his own life, cannot by compact, or his own consent, enslave himself to any one, nor put himself under the absolute arbitrary power of another, to take away life when he pleases.

The blind will always be led by those that see, or fall into the ditch; and he is the most subjected, the most enslaved, who is so in his understanding.

When the succession of ideas ceases, our perception of duration ceases with it; which every one experiments whilst he sleeps soundly.

We have instances of perception whilst we are asleep and retain the memory of them; but how extravagant and incoherent are they, and how little conformable to the perfection of a rational being!

[Children] should be made to rise at their early hour; but great care should be taken in waking them that it be not done hastily.

God having designed man for a sociable creature furnished him with language, which was to be the great instrument and cementer of society.

Subtilty in those who make profession to teach or defend truth hath passed for a virtue: a virtue, indeed, which, consisting for the most part in nothing but the fallacious and illusory use of obscure or deceitful terms, is only fit to make men more conceited in their ignorance.

Sorrow is uneasiness in the mind upon the thought of a good lost which might have been enjoyed longer; or the sense of a present evil.

Defining the soul to be a substance that always thinks, can serve but to make many men suspect that they have no souls at all, since they find a good part of their lives pass away without thinking.

I do not say there is no soul in man because he is not sensible of it in his sleep; but I do say he cannot think at any time, waking or sleeping, without being sensible of it.

It is strange the soul should never once recall over any of its pure native ideas before it borrowed anything from the body; never any other ideas but what derive their original from that union.

Beyond this we have no more a positive distinct notion of infinite space than a mariner has of the depth of the sea, where, having let down a large portion of his sounding-line, he reaches no bottom.

Without the notion and allowance of spirits our philosophy will be lame and defective in one main part of it.

Extravagant young fellows, that have liveliness and spirit, come sometimes to be set right, and so make able and great men; but tame and low spirits very seldom attain to anything.

In learning, little should be proposed to the mind at once; and that being fully mastered, proceed to the next adjoining part, yet unknown, simple unperplexed proposition.

The mind once jaded by an attempt above its power either is disabled for the future, or else checks at any vigorous undertaking ever after.

There is no occasion to oppose the ancients and the moderns, or to be squeamish on either side. He that wisely conducts his mind in the pursuit of knowledge will gather what lights he can from either.

Perspicuity consists in the using of proper terms for the thoughts which a man would have pass from his own mind into that of another.

He must be little skilled in the world who thinks that men’s talking much or little shall hold proportion only to their knowledge.

The great work of a governor is to fashion the carriage, and form the mind, to settle in his pupil good habits, and the principles of virtue and wisdom.

Passionate words or blows from the tutor fill the child’s mind with terror and affrightment, which immediately takes it wholly up, and leaves no room for other impressions.

Set a pleasure tempting, and the hand of the Almighty visibly prepared to take vengeance, and tell whether it be possible for people wantonly to offend against the law.

Where any particular matter of fact is vouched by the concurrent testimony of unsuspected witnesses, there our assent is also unavoidable.

Theology is the comprehension of all other knowledge, directed to its true end, i.e., the honour and veneration of the Creator and the happiness of mankind.

It is strange that the soul should never once recall over any of its pure native thoughts, before it borrowed anything from the body; never bring into the waking man’s view any other ideas but what have a tang of the cask, and derive their original from that union.

We get the idea of time or duration, by reflecting on that train of ideas which succeed one another in our minds: that for this reason, when we sleep soundly without dreaming, we have no perception of time, or the length of it, whilst we sleep; and that the moment wherein we leave off to think, till the moment we begin to think again, seems to have no distance. And so I doubt not but it would be to a waking man if it were possible for him to keep only one idea in his mind, without variation, and the succession of others: and we see that one who fixes his thoughts very intently on one thing, so as to take but little notice of the succession of ideas that pass in his mind whilst he is taken up with that earnest contemplation, lets slip out of his account a good part of that duration, and thinks that time shorter than it is.

This is to translate, and not to define, when we change two words of the same signification one for another; which, when one is better understood than the other, may serve to discover what idea the unknown stands for, but is very far from a definition.

He that is sent out to travel with the thoughts of a man, designing to improve himself, may get into the conversation of persons of condition.

Our whole endeavours are to get rid of the present evil, as the first necessary condition to happiness. Nothing, as we passionately think, can equal the uneasiness that sits so heavy upon us.

The works of nature, and the words of revelation, display truth to mankind in characters so visible that those who are not quite blind may read.

Of lovers of truth for truth’s sake, there is this one unerring mark: the not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.

All the light truth has, or can have, is from the clearness and validity of those proofs upon which it is received: to talk of any other light in the understanding is to put ourselves in the dark, or in the power of the prince of darkness.

The power of perception is that which we call the understanding. Perception, which we make the act of the understanding, is of three sorts: 1. The perception of ideas in our mind; 2. The perception of the signification of signs; 3. The perception of the connection or repugnancy, agreement or disagreement, that there is between any of our ideas. All these are attributed to the understanding, or perceptive power, though it be the two latter only that use allows us to say we understand.

Nobody knows what strength of parts he has till he has tried them. And of the understanding one may most truly say, that its force is greater generally than it thinks, till it is put to it. And, therefore, the proper remedy here is but to 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, dum putant se vincere, vicere. A persuasion that we shall overcome any difficulties that we meet with in the sciences, seldom fails to carry us through them. Nobody knows the strength of his mind, and the force of steady and regular application, till he has tried. This is certain: he that sets out upon weak legs, will not only go farther, but grow stronger too, than one who, with a vigorous constitution and firm limbs, only sits still.

He that will consider the immensity of this fabric, and the great variety that is to be found in this inconsiderable part of it which he has to do with, may think that in other mansions of it there may be other and different intelligent beings.

This is to be remembered, that it is not possible now to keep a young gentleman from vice by a total ignorance of it, unless you will all his life mew him up in a closet, and never let him go into company.

Let a man be ever so well persuaded of the advantages of virtue, yet till he hungers and thirsts after righteousness, his will will not be determined to any action in pursuit of this confessed great good.

All virtue lies in a power of denying our own desires where reason does not authorize them.

Volition is the actual exercise of the power the mind has to order the consideration of any idea, or the forbearing to consider it; or to prefer the motion of any part of the body to its rest by directing any particular action or its forbearance.

The determination of the will, upon inquiry, is following the direction of that guide; and he that has a power to act or not to act, according as such determination directs, is free. Such determination abridges not that power, wherein liberty consists.

He that considers how little our constitution can bear a remove into parts of this air, not much higher than we breathe in, will be satisfied that the all-wise architect has suited our organs and the bodies that are to effect them, one to another.

Intellectual beings in their constant endeavours after true felicity can suspend this prosecution in particular cases, till they have looked before them and informed themselves whether that particular thing lie in their way to their main end.

And hence, perhaps, may be given some reason of that common observation, “That men who have a great deal of wit, and prompt memories, have not always the clearest judgment or deepest reason.” For wit lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures, and agreeable visions in the fancy: judgment, on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating carefully one from another, ideas wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by similitude, and by affinity to take one thing for another. This is a way of proceeding quite contrary to metaphor and allusion; wherein, for the most part, lies that entertainment and pleasantry of wit, which strikes so lively on the fancy, and is therefore so acceptable to all people.

Words are made to declare something: where they are, by those who pretend to instruct, otherwise used, they conceal indeed something; but that which they conceal is nothing but the ignorance, error, or sophistry of the talker; for there is, in truth, nothing else under them.

The chief end of language, in communication, being to be understood, words serve not for that end when any word does not excite in the hearers the same ideas which it stands for in the mind of the speaker.

If reputation attend these conquests which depend on the fineness and niceties of words, it is no wonder if the wit of men so employed should perplex and subtilize the signification of sounds.

The law of works is that law which requires perfect obedience, without remission or abatement; so that by that law a man cannot be just, or justified, without an exact performance of every tittle.

By safe and insensible degrees he will pass from a boy to a man, which is the most hazardous step in life: this therefore should be carefully watched, and a young man with great diligence handed over it.

Young master, willing to show himself a man, lets himself loose to all irregularities: and thus courts credit and manliness in the casting off the modesty he has till then been kept in.

There are ladies, without knowing what tenses and participles, adverbs and prepositions are, speak as properly and correctly as most gentlemen who have been bred up in the ordinary methods of grammar schools.

It must always be remembered that nothing can come into the account of recreation that is not done with delight.

The custom of frequent reflection will keep their minds from running adrift, and call their thoughts home from useless unattentive roving.

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; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, when the rule prescribes not, and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man.