Quotes from George Berkeley

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

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

To be is to be perceived

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

we ought to think with the learned, and speak with the vulgar .

The only things we perceive are our perceptions.

I know what I mean by the term I and myself; and I know this immediately, or intuitively, though I do not perceive it as I perceive a triangle, a colour, or a sound.

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.

truly my opinion is, that all our opinions are alike vain and uncertain. what we approve today, we condemn tomorrow. we keep a stir about knowledge, and spend our lives in the pursuit of it, when, alas! we know nothing all the while: nor do i think it possible for us to ever know anything in this life. our faculties are too narrow and too few. nature certainly never intended us for speculation.

The same principles which at first view lead to skepticism , pursued to a certain point , bring men back to common sense

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.

In vain do we extend our view into the heavens, and pry into the entrails of the earth, in vain do we consult the writings of learned men, and trace the dark footsteps of antiquity; we need only draw the curtain of words, to behold the fairest tree of knowledge, whose fruit is excellent, and within the reach of our hand.

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

I am old and do not suffer fools gently and if you expect me to review your work, it better meet my stringent standards for logic and science.

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 ourselves--that we have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.