George Berkeley Quotes

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, does it make a sound?

What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.

Few men think, yet all will have opinions.

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

It is impossible that a man who is false to his friends and neighbours should be true to the public.

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.

To be is to be perceived

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.

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.

The most ingenious men are now agreed, that [universities] are only nurseries of prejudice, corruption, barbarism, and pedantry.

This perceiving, active being is what I call mind, spirit, soul, or myself. By which words I do not denote any one of my ideas, but a thing entirely distinct from them, wherein they exist, or, which is the same thing, whereby they are perceived; for the existence of an idea consists in being perceived.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

All men have opinions, but few think.

God is a being of transcendent and unlimited perfections: his nature therefore is incomprehensible to finite spirits.

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.

I had rather be an oyster than a man, the most stupid and senseless of animals.

A mind at liberty to reflect on its own observations, if it produce nothing useful to the world, seldom fails of entertainment to itself.

Where the people are well educated, the art of piloting a state is best learned from the writings of Plato.

Whatever is immediately perceived is an idea: and can any idea exist out of the mind?