George Berkeley Quotes

All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth - in a word, all those bodies which compose the frame of the world - have not any subsistence without a mind.

To be is to be perceived (Esse est percipi)." Or, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Truth is the cry of all, but the game of few.

It is impossible that a man who is false to his friends and neighbours should be true to the public.

Few men think, yet all will have opinions.

The world is like a board with holes in it, and the square men have got into the round holes, and the round into the square.

I had rather be an oyster than a man, the most stupid and senseless of animals.

That thing of hell and eternal punishment is the most absurd, as well as the most disagreeable thought that ever entered into the head of mortal man.

So long as I confine my thoughts to my own ideas divested of words, I do not see how I can be easily mistaken.

A ray of imagination or of wisdom may enlighten the universe, and glow into remotest centuries.

Where the people are well educated, the art of piloting a state is best learned from the writings of Plato.

God is a being of transcendent and unlimited perfections: his nature therefore is incomprehensible to finite spirits.

Religion is the centre which unites, and the cement which connects the several parts of members of the political body.

The most ingenious men are now agreed, that [universities] are only nurseries of prejudice, corruption, barbarism, and pedantry.

Every knave is a thorough knave, and a thorough knave is a knave throughout.

All men have opinions, but few think.

HE who says there is no such thing as an honest man, you may be sure is himself a knave.

That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow.

A mind at liberty to reflect on its own observations, if it produce nothing useful to the world, seldom fails of entertainment to itself.

There being in the make of an English mind a certain gloom and eagerness, which carries to the sad extreme; religion to fanaticism; free-thinking to atheism; liberty to rebellion.

To be is to be perceived

Many things, for aught I know, may exist, whereof neither I nor any other man hath or can have any idea or notion whatsoever.

[Christianity] neither enjoins the nastiness of the Cynic, nor the insensibility of the Stoic.

Our youth we can have but to-day, We may always find time to grow old.

In short, if there were external bodies, it is impossible we should ever come to know it; and if there were not, we might have the very same reasons to think there were that we have now.

If we admit a thing so extraordinary as the creation of this world, it should seem that we admit something strange, and odd, and new to human apprehension, beyond any other miracle whatsoever.

The eye by long use comes to see even in the darkest cavern: and there is no subject so obscure but we may discern some glimpse of truth by long poring on it.

We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.

To me it seems that liberty and virtue were made for each other. If any man wish to enslave his country, nothing is a fitter preparative than vice; and nothing leads to vice so surely as irreligion.

What doubts, what hypotheses, what labyrinths of amusement, what fields of disputation, what an ocean of false learning, may be avoided by that single notion of immaterialism!

From my own being, and from the dependency I find in myself and my ideas, I do, by an act of reason, necessarily infer the existence of a God, and of all created things in the mind of God.

The same principles which at first view lead to skepticism, pursued to a certain point, bring men back to common sense.

Others indeed may talk, and write, and fight about liberty, and make an outward pretence to it but the free-thinker alone is truly free.

Whatever is immediately perceived is an idea: and can any idea exist out of the mind?

[Tar water] is of a nature so mild and benign and proportioned to the human constitution, as to warm without heating, to cheer but not inebriate.

The fawning courtier and the surly squire often mean the same thing,--each his own interest.

Westward the course of empire takes its way; The four first acts already past, A fifth shall close the drama with the day: Time's noblest offspring is the last.

For my own private satisfaction, I had rather be master of my own time than wear a diadem.

To be a good patriot, a man must consider his countrymen as God's creatures, and himself as accountable for his acting towards them.

Whose fault is it if poor Ireland still continues poor?

The table I write on I say exists ... meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it.

The method of Fluxions is the general key by help whereof the modern mathematicians unlock the secrets of Geometry, and consequently of Nature.

I might as well doubt of my own being, as of the being of those things I actually see and feel.

But the velocities of the velocities - the second, third, fourth, and fifth velocities, etc. - exceed, if I mistake not, all human understanding.

Doth the Reality of sensible things consist in being perceived? or, is it something distinct from their being perceived, and that bears no relation to the mind?

Certainly he who can digest a second or third fluxion need not, methinks, be squeamish about any point in divinity.