George Berkeley Quotes

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

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

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

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

Few men think, yet all will have opinions.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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

[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.

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

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

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

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

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

The love of truth, virtue, and the happiness of mankind are specious pretexts, but not the inward principles that set divines at work; else why should they affect to abuse human reason, to disparage natural religion, to traduce the philosophers as they universally do?

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.

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

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.