Quotes from George Berkeley

To me it seems that liberty and virtue were made for each other. If any man wish to enslave his country, nothing is a fitter preparative than vice; and nothing leads to vice so surely as irreligion.

A good groom will rather stroke than strike.

Weak men, indeed, are prejudiced towards rules and systems in life and government; and think if these are gone all is gone: but a man of a great soul and free spirit delights in the noble experiment of blowing up systems and dissolving governments, to mould them anew upon other principles and in another shape.

When a man dies a world perishes--the world which he bore in his head. The more intelligent the head, the more clear, significant, and comprehensive was its world, the more terrible its destruction.

No one loves to tell a tale of scandal, but to him that loves to hear it.

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.

The wheels of government go on, though wound up by different hands.

But where men, to the force of appetite and passion, add that of opinion, and are wicked from principle, there will be more men wicked, and those more incurably and outrageously so.

The primary aim of all religions and philosophical systems is to furnish an antidote to the certainty of death.

And what are these fluxions? The velocities of evanescent increments. And what are these same evanescent increments? They are neither finite quantities, nor quantities infinitely small, nor yet nothing. May we not call them ghosts of departed quantities?

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

Westward the course of empire takes its way;The four first acts already past,A fifth shall close the drama with the day:Time's noblest offspring is the last.

Berkeley's belief was that such a view, despite its assertion of God and human minds or souls, is an implicit encouragement to atheism.

Query 1. Whether there ever was, is, or will be, an industrious nation poor, or an idle rich?

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

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

Few men think, yet all will have opinions.

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

Many things, for aught I know, may exist, whereof neither I nor any other man hath or can have any idea or notion whatsoever.

To me it seems that liberty and virtue were made for each other. If any man wish to enslave his country, nothing is a fitter preparative than vice; and nothing leads to vice so surely as irreligion.

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.

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.