Man is an Animal, formidable both from his Passions and his Reason; his Passions often urging him to great Evils, and his Reason furnishing Means to achieve them. To train this Animal, and make him amenable to Order; to inure him to a Sense of Justice and Virtue, to withhold him from ill Courses by Fear, and encourage him in his Duty by Hopes; in short, to fashion and model him for Society, hath been the Aim of civil and religious Institutions; and, in all Times, the Endeavour of good and wise Men. The aptest Method for attaining this End, hath been always judged a proper Education.
George BerkeleyHow often must I repeat, that I know or am conscious of my own being; and that I myself am not my ideas, but somewhat else, a thinking, active principle that perceives, knows, wills, and operates about ideas?
George BerkeleyWhat 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!
George BerkeleyUpon 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.
George BerkeleyThere 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.
George BerkeleyA man needs no arguments to make him discern and approve what is beautiful: it strikes at first sight, and attracts without a reason. And as this beauty is found in the shape and form of corporeal things, so also is there analogous to it a beauty of another kind, an order, a symmetry, and comeliness in the moral world. And as the eye perceiveth the one, so the mind doth by a certain interior sense perceive the other, which sense, talent, or faculty, is ever quickest and purest in the noblest minds.
George Berkeley