John Locke Quotes

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Typically, when you read, you have more time to think. Reading gives you a unique pause button for comprehension and insight. By and large, with oral language - when you watch a film or listen to a tape - you don't press pause.

Contemplation is to knowledge what digestion is to food - the way to get life out of it

Care about understanding and before you know it, in just a few decades, you'll have a system of thinking that gives you answers whenever you ask.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost.

Learning is more than absorbing facts, it is acquiring understanding.

You must think. The eye is not enough; it needs to think as well.

To learn without thinking is labour in vain, to think without learning is desolation.

One of the few ways I can almost be certain I'll understand something is by sitting down and writing about it. Because by forcing yourself to write about it and putting it down in words, you can't avoid having your say on the subject. You might be wrong, but you have to think about it very intensely to write about it.

Study without reflection is a waste of time; reflection without study is dangerous.

Force yourself to reflect on what you read, paragraph by paragraph.

Learning, undigested by thought, is labor lost.

Books have this function that help me to understand the work I've done, to wrap it up.

The mind is like the stomach. It is not how much you put into it that counts, but how much it digests.

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

If you will read again what is written, you will see how it was.

Rereading, we find a new book.

Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.

I like reading reviews. If they're clearly hating on you, I try not to read that deeply. But if they really are trying to understand, it's interesting.

He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.

I suggest that an education and reading and facts aren't bad things on which to ponder a few notions.

A lot of the fun lies in trying to penetrate the mystery; and this is best done by saying over the lines to yourself again and again, till they pass through the stage of sounding like nonsense, and finally return to a full sense that had at first escaped notice.

I don't read as much as people may expect. In fact, sometimes I feel that I should probably read more, but then I do believe that one of the big problems of our times is that there's too much reading and not enough thinking.

The one thing I've tried to do is be insightful.