George Berkeley Quotes

37 quotes in 506 categories

• The same principles which at first view lead to skepticism, pursued to a certain point, bring men back to common sense.
• All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth - in a word, all those bodies which compose the frame of the world - have…
• Few men think, yet all will have opinions.
• I had rather be an oyster than a man, the most stupid and senseless of animals.
• He who says there is no such thing as an honest man, you may be sure is himself a knave.
• What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.
• To be is to be perceived
• 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,…
• So long as I confine my thoughts to my own ideas divested of words, I do not see how I can be easily mistaken.
• 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…
• 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.
• 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…
• 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…
• A mind at liberty to reflect on its own observations, if it produce nothing useful to the world, seldom fails of entertainment to itself.
• That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow.
• 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…
• 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…
• We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.
• The question between the materialists and me is not, whether things have a real existence out of the mind of this or that person, but…
• But, say you, surely there is nothing easier than for me to imagine trees, for instance, in a park [. . .] and nobody by…

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