George Berkeley Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“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.”
-- George BerkeleySource : A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge pt. 1, sec. 6 (1710)
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“So long as I confine my thoughts to my own ideas divested of words, I do not see how I can be easily mistaken.”
-- George Berkeley -
“I had rather be an oyster than a man, the most stupid and senseless of animals.”
-- George BerkeleySource : George Berkeley, Alexander Campbell Fraser (1871). “Miscellaneous works. Index, v.1-3”, p.187
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“Many things, for aught I know, may exist, whereof neither I nor any other man hath or can have any idea or notion whatsoever.”
-- George Berkeley -
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“That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow.”
-- George Berkeley -
“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?”
-- George Berkeley -
“Few men think, yet all will have opinions.”
-- George BerkeleySource : George Berkeley (1843). “Works, Including His Letters to Thomas Prior, Dean Gervais, Mr. Pope, &c. to which is Prefixed an Account of His Life”, p.187
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“Truth is the cry of all, but the game of few.”
-- George BerkeleySource : 'Siris' (1744) para. 368
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“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.”
-- George BerkeleySource : George Berkeley (1837). “Works: Account of His Life and Letters”, p.122
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“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!”
-- George Berkeley -
“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.”
-- George Berkeley -
“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.”
-- George Berkeley -
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“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.”
-- George Berkeley -
“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.”
-- George Berkeley -
“Religion is the centre which unites, and the cement which connects the several parts of members of the political body.”
-- George Berkeley -
“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.”
-- George Berkeley -
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“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.”
-- George BerkeleySource : George Berkeley (2015). “Principles of Human Knowledge: Human Understanding”, p.17, 谷月社
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“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.”
-- George Berkeley -
“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?”
-- George Berkeley -
“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.”
-- George Berkeley -
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“I might as well doubt of my own being, as of the being of those things I actually see and feel.”
-- George Berkeley -
“God is a being of transcendent and unlimited perfections: his nature therefore is incomprehensible to finite spirits.”
-- George BerkeleySource : George Berkeley (1843). “Works, Including His Letters to Thomas Prior, Dean Gervais, Mr. Pope, &c. to which is Prefixed an Account of His Life”, p.221
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“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.”
-- George BerkeleySource : George Berkeley (2015). “Principles of Human Knowledge: Human Understanding”, p.134, 谷月社
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“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.”
-- George Berkeley -
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“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.”
-- 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?”
-- 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.”
-- George Berkeley -
“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.”
-- George Berkeley -
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“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.”
-- George Berkeley -
“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.”
-- George Berkeley
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