When there's trouble I don't like running, but I'm afraid I got more in common with who I was, than who I am becoming

For Berkeley (normal) vision is a language whereby God tells us about the tangible world. But prior to having experience of the tangible world, the visual language would be as meaningless as an utterly alien language. It would convey no meaning to the sighted mind.

For it oft happens that a notion, when it is cloathed with words, seems tedious and operose and hard to be conceived, which yet being striped of that garniture, the ideas shrink into a narrow compass, and are viewed almost by one glance of thought.

All the characters on the album are inside me, though none are me. They are sides of me or who I was.

Spend regularly and constantly two or three hours of the morning in study and retirement. I do not take upon me to prescribe what you shall employ yourself about. I only propose the passing two or three hours of the twenty-four in private.

Unless we take care to clear the first principles of knowledge from the incumbrance and delusion of words, we may make infinite reasonings upon them to no purpose. We may deduce consequences, and never be the wiser.

It would be wrong of me to suppose that just because I can form private mental images, that everyone can. As Francis Galton and William James long ago showed, a small proportion of adults-and some of these extremely intelligent-are unable to form such visual images. Berkeley's point is that it would be equally arrogant for these non-thinkers or non-image formers to claim that everyone is like them in the relevant respect. The temptation to pontificate in that way reveals a narrowness and unwillingness to see the world from another perspective.