Especially Good Quotes from John Locke

"[A] proposition concerning abstract ideas must be eternally true if it is ever true."
---John Locke, Essay IV.xii.14


"In any of a thousand ways he could have ceased to exist since I had the testimony of my senses for his existence...  while I am alone in my study writing this I am not certain enough of this to say that I know it to be so"      ---John Locke, Essay IV.xi.9: I'm theorizing that this is the origin of Descartes' automata-with-umbrellas example.


"I can be as sure that if I move thus and so I will feel pain as I can be that I shall move thus and so..."

---John  Locke, Essay IV.xi.8

"Again, we remember the pains of hunger, thirst, or headache without any pain at all: if these were nothing but ideas floating in our minds, without the real existence of things affecting us from outside ourselves, we would either •never suffer from them or else always do so whenever we thought of them."

---John Locke, Essay IV.xi.6

[The above come from the Jonathan Bennett translation].