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Locke Quotes

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Locke Quotes

“Wait,' he says, taking a step toward me. 'I want to see you again.' I groan, too exasperated for surprise. I am standing here in a borrowed blanket, boots, and mall-bought underwear. I am smeared in soil, and I have just made a fool of myself. 'Why?' He looks at me as though he sees something else entirely. There's an intensity in his gaze that makes me stand up a little straighter, despite the dirt. 'Because you're like a story that hasn't happened yet. Because I want to see what you will do. I want to be part of the unfolding of the tale.”

Holly BlackVillainThe Folk Of The AirJude DuarteJudeThe Cruel PrinceLockeCuriousityRun Away NowVomit Inducing
Book:The Cruel Prince
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“The first sentence of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s that reached me still jolts me every time I run into it. “Meek young men,” he wrote in “The American Scholar,” “grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books…”

LibrariesLockeBaconEmersonCicero
Book:First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process
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“Once upon a time, there was a girl named Taryn. She suffered many indignities at the hands of the magical people called the Folk, yet she never was anything but kind, no matter how they despised her. Then one day, a fox-haired faerie boy looked upon her and saw her virtue and her loveliness, so he took her to be his bride. And on his arm, dressed in a gown as bright as the stars, the other Folk saw her for the first time. They knew that they’d misjudged her and…”

LockeTaryn Duarte
Book:The Lost Sisters
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“MATERIAL SUBSTANCE was criticized by Berkeley with such telling effect that his name has reverberated through all subsequent philosophy. Berkeley's treatment of the notion of matter is so well known as to need hardly more than a mention. So far from denying the external world which we know, Berkeley corroborated it. It was the scholastic notion of a material substance unapproachable by us, BEHIND the external world, deeper and more real than it, and needed to support it, which Berkeley maintained to be the most effective of all reducers of the external world to unreality. Abolish that substance, he said, believe that God, whom you can understand and approach, sends you the sensible world directly, and you confirm the latter and back it up by his divine authority. Berkeley's criticism of 'matter' was consequently absolutely pragmatistic. Matter is known as our sensations of colour, figure, hardness and the like. They are the cash-value of the term. The difference matter makes to us by truly being is that we then get such sensations; by not being, is that we lack them. These sensations then are its sole meaning. Berkeley doesn't deny matter, then; he simply tells us what it consists of. It is a true name for just so much in the way of sensations. Locke, and later Hume, applied a similar pragmatic criticism to the notion of SPIRITUAL SUBSTANCE. I will only mention Locke's treatment of our 'personal identity.' He immediately reduces this notion to its pragmatic value in terms of experience. It means, he says, so much consciousness,' namely the fact that at one moment of life we remember other moments, and feel them all as parts of one and the same personal history. Rationalism had explained this practical continuity in our life by the unity of our soul-substance. But Locke says: suppose that God should take away the consciousness, should WE be any the better for having still the soul-principle? Suppose he annexed the same consciousness to different souls, | should we, as WE realize OURSELVES, be any the worse for that fact? In Locke's day the soul was chiefly a thing to be rewarded or punished. See how Locke, discussing it from this point of view, keeps the question pragmatic: Suppose, he says, one to think himself to be the same soul that once was Nestor or Thersites. Can he think their actions his own any more than the actions of any other man that ever existed? But | let him once find himself CONSCIOUS of any of the actions of Nestor, he then finds himself the same person with Nestor. ... In this personal identity is founded all the right and justice of reward and punishment. It may be reasonable to think”

EmpiricismLockeHume Berkeley
Author:William James
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“The boy's friends come over to lead him away, and at that moment, improbably, Locke's gaze lifts. His tawny fox eyes meet mine and widen in surprise. I am immobilised, my heart speeding. I brace myself for more scorn, but then one corner of his mouth lifts. He winks, as if in acknowledgement of being caught out. As if we're sharing a secret. As if he thinks I am not loathly, as though he does not find my mortality contagious.”

SurpriseHolly BlackThe Folk Of The AirJude DuarteJudeThe Cruel PrinceEye ContactLockeWink
Book:The Cruel Prince
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“Human nature with all its infirmities and deprivation is still capable of great things. It is capable of attaining to degrees of wisdom and goodness, which we have reason to believe, appear as respectable in the estimation of superior intelligences. Education makes a greater difference between man and man, than nature has made between man and brute. The virtues and powers to which men may be trained, by early education and constant discipline, are truly sublime and astonishing. Isaac Newton and John Locke are examples of the deep sagacity which may be acquired by long habits of thinking and study.”

NewtonLockeIsaac NewtonJohn Locke
Book:Familiar Letters of John Adams & His Wife Abigail Adams, During the Revolution
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“Fairy tales are full of girls who wait, who endure, who suffer. Good girls. Obedient girls. Girls who crush nettles until their hands bleed. Girls who haul water for witches. Girls who wander through deserts or sleep in ashes or make homes for transformed brothers in the woods. Girls without hands, without eyes, without the power of speech, without any power at all. But then a prince rides up and sees the girl and finds her beautiful. Beautiful, not despite her suffering, but because of it. And when I saw that note in my bag, I thought that maybe I was no longer stuck in a fairy tale, maybe I could be the hero of one.”

HeroHopefulHolly BlackThe Folk Of The AirFairy TalesLockeTaryn DuarteTarynThe Lost SistersGirls Who Endure
Book:The Lost Sisters
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“I think I understand now what you meant when you said I have to give up my mortal qualms. And I am willing to do that. But I want you to marry me.' 'Ah.' He sat down on the couch, looking stunned with lack of sleep. 'And so you came here in the middle of the night?' 'I hope that you love me,' I tried to sound the way Oriana did when she forbade us to do things- stern, but not unkind. 'And I will try to live as the Folk do. But you ought to marry me even if neither of those things were true, because otherwise I might ruin your fun.' 'My fun?' he echoed. Then he sounded worried. Then he sounded awake. 'Whatever game you are playing with Nicasia and Cardan,' I said. 'And with me. Tell Madoc we're to be wed and tell Jude about your real intentions or I will start shaping stories of my own.' ... I realised that Locke might teach me lessons, but he wasn't going to like what I did once I learned them. 'You promised-' he began, but I cut him off. 'Not a marriage of a year and a day, either,' I said. 'I want you to love me until you die.' He blinked. 'Don't you mean until you did? Because you're sure to.' I shook my head. 'You're going to live forever. If you love me, I will become a part of your story. I will live on in that.' He looked at me in a way he'd never done before, as though evaluating me all over again. Then he nodded. 'We will marry,' he said, holding up his hand. 'On three conditions. The first is that you will tell no one about us until the coronation of Prince Dain.' That seemed like a small thing, the waiting. 'And during that time, you must not renounce me, no matter what I say or do.' I know the nature of faerie bargains. I should have heard this as the warning that it was. Instead, I was only glad that two of his conditions seemed simple enough to fulfill. 'What else?' Be bold, be bold, but not too bold, lest that your heart's blood should run cold. 'Only this,' Locke said. 'Remember we don't love the way that you do.”

ThreatWarningHolly BlackProposalLockeRed FlagsTaryn DuarteTarynThe Lost SistersBribing
Book:The Lost Sisters
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“Once upon a time, there was a girl named Taryn and she had a faerie lover who came to her at night. He was generous and adoring, but visited only in the dark. He asked for two things: one, for her to keep their meetings secret, and two, never to look upon his face fully. And so, night after night she took delight in him but, after some time had passed, wondered what his secret could be.”

Holly BlackLoverFaerieToxic RelationshipsSecretiveLockeRed FlagsTaryn DuarteTarynThe Lost Sisters
Book:The Lost Sisters
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“People acquire a right to property by giving it value - which Locke makes very clear means exchange value. This had vast implications not only for the domestic practice of enclosure but also for the dispossession of indigenous peoples in colonial territories - and on that score, Locke was quite explicit. [...] The measure of labour is not effort but profitability. We can, then, easily deduce that the Indian has failed to establish his right to the land, which becomes fair game to more 'industrious' and 'rational' colonists. Unimproved land is waste, and a man who appropriates it to himself in order to improve it has, by increasing its value, given something to humanity, not taken it away.”

CapitalismNative AmericanLocke
Book:The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View
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“The Creator, the Primordial Being (Universal Mind), is the Ultimate Primary Quality of Reality. Creation (energy, matter) is the secondary quality of reality. The effects of the secondary qualities on the mind are tertiary qualities on my scale of qualities. In Lock’s classification, our secondary quality would be primary, and our tertiary quality would be secondary. This distinction is essential for understanding the nature of reality.”

MatterMassDejan StojanovicAbsoluteUniversal MindLockeQualities Of Matter
Book:ABSOLUTE
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