John Locke Quotes

The knowledge of numbers is one of the chief distinctions between us and the brutes.

Amongst the minds of animals that of man leads, not as a demigod from another planet, but as a king from the same race.

Alcmaeon was the first to define the difference between man and animals, saying that man differs from the latter in the fact that he alone has the power of understanding.

The concept of number is the obvious distinction between the beast and man.

You can't measure a dog's intelligence by giving him a verbal test 'cause it's not on their scale, but that doesn't mean they're not intelligent creatures.

There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties...The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.

Animals are good to think with.

The glory of man is that he is a thinking being. It is the nature of man to think and therein he differs from animals

For me, intuitive thinking means associative thinking; intuition causes us to introduce narrative or figurative elements into a poem before we're able to explain why those elements belong.

Humans can think inhuman thoughts.

We find animals doing things that we, in our arrogance, used to think was "just human".

The pretense that humans are superior to nonhumans is entirely unsupportable. I have seen no compelling evidence that humans are particularly more "intelligent" than any other creature. I have had long and fruitful relationshis with many nonhuman animals, both domesticated and wild, and have reveled in the bouquet of radically different intelligences - different forms, not different "quantities" that they have introduced to me, each in his or her own time, in his or her own way.

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.

We think not in words but in shadows of words.

There are a lot of smart creatures out there. Dolphins, elephants, and whales are smart. And there are some really smart birds. I know some really intelligent fish. But they cannot know what humans know and are incapable of inflicting as much damage.

What do you think of the human mind? I mean, in case you think there is a human mind.

The educated horse is a thinking horse, and it seems that he understands every now and then something happens that he must chalk up as a mistake and be done with it.

But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it.

To understand animal thinking you've got to get away from a language.

Nobody really thinks who does not abstract from that which is given, who does not relate the facts to the factors which have made them, who does not - in his mind - undo the facts. Abstractness is the very life of thought, the token of its authenticity.

What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.

For those who either perceive but dully, or retain the ideas that come into their minds but ill, who cannot readily excite or compound them, will have little matter to think on.

If you look up 'Intelligence' in the new volumes of the Encyclopeadia Britannica, you'll find it classified under the following three heads: Intelligence, Human; Intelligence, Animal; Intelligence, Military. My stepfather's a perfect specimen of Intelligence, Military.

The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.

Mere animals couldn’t possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a human being to be really stupid.