George Berkeley Quotes
-
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.
→ -
Whatever the world thinks, he who hath not much meditated upon God, the human soul, and the summum bonum, may possibly make a thriving earthworm, but will most indubitably make a sorry patriot and a sorry statesman.
→ -
Whenever I attempt to frame a simple idea of time, abstracted from the succession of ideas in my mind, which flows uniformly, and is participated by all beings, I am lost and embrangled in inextricable difficulties.
→ -
To be is to be perceived
→ -
I do not deny the existence of material substance merely because I have no notion of it, but because the notion of it is inconsistent, or in other words, because it is repugnant that there should be a notion of it.
→ -
I am apt to think, if we knew what it was to be an angel for one hour, we should return to this world, though it were to sit on the brightest throne in it, with vastly more loathing and reluctance than we would now descend into a loathsome dungeon or sepulchre.
→ -
God is a being of transcendent and unlimited perfections: his nature therefore is incomprehensible to finite spirits.
→ -
I had rather be an oyster than a man, the most stupid and senseless of animals.
→ -
Upon the whole, I am inclined to think that the far greater part, if not all, of those difficulties which have hitherto amused philosophers, and blocked up the way to knowledge, are entirely owing to our selves. That we have first raised a dust, and then complain, we cannot see.
→ -
A ray of imagination or of wisdom may enlighten the universe, and glow into remotest centuries.
→ -
All men have opinions, but few think.
→ -
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.
→ -
Whose fault is it if poor Ireland still continues poor?
→ -
All that stock of arguments [the skeptics] produce to depreciate our faculties, and make mankind appear ignorant and low, are drawn principally from this head, to wit, that we are under an invincible blindness as to the true and real nature of things.
→ -
Of all men living [priests] are our greatest enemies. If it were possible, they would extinguish the very light of nature, turn the world into a dungeon, and keep mankind for ever in chains and darkness.
→ -
Nothing can be plainer, than that the motions, changes, decays, and dissolutions, which we hourly see befall natural bodies (and which is what we mean by the course of nature), cannot possibly affect an active, simple, uncompounded substance: such a being therefore is indissoluble by the force of nature, that is to say, the soul of man is naturally immortal.
→ -
Casting an eye on the education of children, from whence I can make a judgment of my own, I observe they are instructed in religious matters before they can reason about them, and consequently that all such instruction is nothing else but filling the tender mind of a child with prejudices.
→ -
Many things, for aught I know, may exist, whereof neither I nor any other man hath or can have any idea or notion whatsoever.
→ -
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.
→ -
Every knave is a thorough knave, and a thorough knave is a knave throughout.
→ -
What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.
→ -
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.
→ -
Whatever is immediately perceived is an idea: and can any idea exist out of the mind?
→ -
And what are these fluxions? The velocities of evanescent increments. And what are these same evanescent increments? They are neither finite quantities, nor quantities infinitely small, nor yet nothing. May we not call them the ghosts of departed quantities...?
→ -
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.
→ -
The real essence, the internal qualities, and constitution of even the meanest object, is hid from our view; something there is inevery drop of water, every grain of sand, which it is beyond the power of human understanding to fathom or comprehend. But it is evidentthat we are influenced by false principles to that degree as to mistrust our senses, and think we know nothing of those things which we perfectly comprehend.
→ -
Truth is the cry of all, but the game of few.
→ -
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!
→ -
To be a good patriot, a man must consider his countrymen as God's creatures, and himself as accountable for his acting towards them.
→ -
[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.
→
Related Authors
-
Thomas Hobbes Philosopher -
Etienne Bonnot de Condillac Philosopher -
Adam Smith Philosopher -
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Philosopher -
David Hume Philosopher -
Immanuel Kant Philosopher -
John Stuart Mill Philosopher -
Baruch Spinoza Philosopher -
Henri Bergson Philosopher -
Gottfried Leibniz Mathematician -
Rene Descartes Philosopher -
Nicolas Malebranche Philosopher -
Francis Bacon Former Lord Chancellor -
John Locke Philosopher -
Arthur Schopenhauer Philosopher -
Jean-Jacques Rousseau Philosopher -
Isaac Newton Physicist -
Plato Philosopher -
William James Philosopher -
Aristotle Philosopher