“Suppose now one of your hands hot, and the other cold, and that they are both at once put into the same vessel of water, in an intermediate state, will not the water seem cold to one hand, and warm to the other?”
Source: Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous
“My inference will be that you mean nothing at all. That you employ words to no manner or purpose without any design or signification whatsoever. And I leave it to you to consider how mere jargon should be treated.”
Source: Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous
“Every knave is a thorough knave, and a thorough knave is a knave throughout.”
Source: Works: Account of His Life and Letters
“Atheism ... that bugbear of women and fools ... is the very top and perfection of free-thinking. It is the grand arcanum to which a true genius naturally riseth, by a certain climax or gradation of thought, and without which he can never possess his soul in absolute liberty and repose.”
Source: The Works of George Berkeley ...: Philosophical works, 1732-33: Alciphron. The theory of vision
“Whatever is immediately perceived is an idea: and can any idea exist out of the mind?”
“Whose fault is it if poor Ireland still continues poor?”
“It is impossible that a man who is false to his friends and neighbours should be true to the public.”
“Religion is the centre which unites, and the cement which connects the several parts of members of the political body.”
Source: A Miscellany, Containing Several Tracts on Various Subjects
“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.”
Source: Works: Account of His Life and Letters
“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.”
Source: The Works of George Berkeley, D.D., Formerly Bishop of Cloyne: Philosophical works, 1732-33: Alciphron. The theory of vision
“A 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.”
Source: Alciphron: Or, The Minute Philosopher. In Seven Dialogues Containing an Apology for the Christian Religion Against Those who are Called Free-thinkers
“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?”
Source: Philosophical works
“That the discovery of this great truth, which lies so near and obvious to the mind, should be attained to by the reason of so veryfew, is a sad instance of the stupidity and inattention of men, who, though they are surrounded with such clear manifestations of the Deity, are yet so little affected by them, that they seem as it were blinded with excess of light.”
Source: A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
“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.”
Source: Principles of Human Knowledge: Human Understanding
“That food nourishes, sleep refreshes, and fire warms us; that to sow in the seed-time is the way to reap in the harvest, and, in general, that to obtain such or such ends, such or such means are conducive, all this we know, not by discovering any necessary connexion between our ideas, but only by the observation of the settled laws of nature, without which we should be all in uncertainty and confusion, and a grown man no more know how to manage himself in the affairs of life than an infant just born.”
Source: Principles of Human Knowledge
“The real essence, the internal qualities, and constitution of even the meanest object, is hid from our view; something there is inevery drop of water, every grain of sand, which it is beyond the power of human understanding to fathom or comprehend. But it is evidentthat we are influenced by false principles to that degree as to mistrust our senses, and think we know nothing of those things which we perfectly comprehend.”
“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.”
Source: A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
“All those who write either explicitly or by insinuation against the dignity, freedom, and immortality of the human soul, may so far forth be justly said to unhinge the principles of morality, and destroy the means of making men reasonably virtuous.”
Source: The applied philosophical works
“What 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!”
Source: The works of George Berkeley
“I might as well doubt of my own being, as of the being of those things I actually see and feel.”
Source: Berkeley: Philosophical Writings
“God is a being of transcendent and unlimited perfections: his nature therefore is incomprehensible to finite spirits.”
Source: Works, Including His Letters to Thomas Prior, Dean Gervais, Mr. Pope, &c. to which is Prefixed an Account of His Life
“Did men but consider that the sun, moon, and stars, and every other object of the senses, are only so many sensations in their minds, which have no other existence but barely being perceived, doubtless they would never fall down and worship their own ideas; but rather address their homage to that eternal invisible Mind which produces and sustains all things.”
Source: Principles of Human Knowledge: Human Understanding
“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.”
Source: Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous
“How 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?”
Source: Works: Account of His Life and Letters
“[Christianity] neither enjoins the nastiness of the Cynic, nor the insensibility of the Stoic.”
Source: Alciphron: or, The minute philosopher. 1732. Siris. 1744
“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.”
Source: Works, Including His Letters to Thomas Prior, Dean Gervais, Mr. Pope, &c. to which is Prefixed an Account of His Life
“The most ingenious men are now agreed, that [universities] are only nurseries of prejudice, corruption, barbarism, and pedantry.”
“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.”
Source: Works, Including His Letters to Thomas Prior, Dean Gervais, Mr. Pope, &c. to which is Prefixed an Account of His Life
“It would much conduce to the public benefit, if, instead of discouraging free-thinking, there was erected in the midst of this free country a dianoetic academy, or seminary for free-thinkers, provided with retired chambers, and galleries, and shady walks and groves, where, after seven years spent in silence and meditation, a man might commence a genuine free-thinker, and from that time forward, have license to think what he pleased, and a badge to distinguish him from counterfeits.”
Source: Alciphron: Or, The Minute Philosopher. In Seven Dialogues. Containing an Apology for the Christian Religion Against Those who are Called Free-thinkers ...
“All that stock of arguments [the skeptics] produce to depreciate our faculties, and make mankind appear ignorant and low, are drawn principally from this head, to wit, that we are under an invincible blindness as to the true and real nature of things.”
Source: A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge ...
“I am apt to think, if we knew what it was to be an angel for one hour, we should return to this world, though it were to sit on the brightest throne in it, with vastly more loathing and reluctance than we would now descend into a loathsome dungeon or sepulchre.”
Source: The works of George Berkeley
“It is a mistake, to think the same thing affects both sight and touch. If the same angle or square, which is the object of touch,be also the object of vision, what should hinder the blind man, at first sight, from knowing it?”
Source: The Works of George Berkeley, D.D., Bishop of Cloyne: Including His Letters to Thomas Prior, Esq., Dean Gervais, Mr. Pope, &c., &c. ; to which is Prefixed an Account of His Life
“If what you mean by the word "matter" be only the unknown support of unknown qualities, it is no matter whether there is such a thing or no, since it no way concerns us; and I do not see the advantage there is in disputing about what we know not what, and we know not why.”
Source: Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues
“Whenever I attempt to frame a simple idea of time, abstracted from the succession of ideas in my mind, which flows uniformly, and is participated by all beings, I am lost and embrangled in inextricable difficulties.”
Source: Berkeley: Philosophical Writings
“The method of Fluxions is the general key by help whereof the modern mathematicians unlock the secrets of Geometry, and consequently of Nature.”
Source: The Analyst: A Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician
“The table I write on I say exists ... meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it.”
Source: Principles of Human Knowledge: Human Understanding
“All men have opinions, but few think.”
“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.”
“Make a point never go clear, it is great odds that a man whose habits and the bent of whose mind lie a contrary way, shall be unable to comprehend it. So weak a thing is reason in competition with inclination.”
“For my own private satisfaction, I had rather be master of my own time than wear a diadem.”
“Where the people are well educated, the art of piloting a state is best learned from the writings of Plato.”
Source: The works of George Berkeley
“The fawning courtier and the surly squire often mean the same thing,--each his own interest.”
Source: Works: Account of His Life and Letters
“I imagine that thinking is the great desideratum of the present age; and the cause of whatever is done amiss may justly be reckoned the general neglect of education in those who need it most, the people of fashion. What can be expected where those who have the most influence have the least sense, and those who are sure to be followed set the worst examples?”
Source: The Works of George Berkeley, D.D., Bishop of Cloyne: Including His Letters to Thomas Prior, Esq., Dean Gervais, Mr. Pope, &c., &c. ; to which is Prefixed an Account of His Life
“In short, if there were external bodies, it is impossible we should ever come to know it; and if there were not, we might have the very same reasons to think there were that we have now.”
Source: Principles of Human Knowledge: Human Understanding
“The same principles which at first view lead to skepticism, pursued to a certain point, bring men back to common sense.”
Source: Works
“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 a good patriot, a man must consider his countrymen as God's creatures, and himself as accountable for his acting towards them.”
Source: Works: Account of His Life and Letters
“Truth is the cry of all, but the game of few.”
“Few men think, yet all will have opinions.”
Source: Works, Including His Letters to Thomas Prior, Dean Gervais, Mr. Pope, &c. to which is Prefixed an Account of His Life
“I had rather be an oyster than a man, the most stupid and senseless of animals.”
Source: Miscellaneous works. Index, v.1-3
