George Berkeley Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

View all George Berkeley Quotes
Oh nature! the genuine beauty of pure nature!

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

George Berkeley
Take away the signs from Arithmetic & Algebra, & pray what remains?

George Berkeley
Our youth we can have but today,
We may always find time to grow old.

George Berkeley
Every knave is a thorough knave, and a thorough knave is a knave throughout.

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

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

George Berkeley
Disputes are not to be decided by the weight of authority, but by the force of reason.

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

George Berkeley
For my own private satisfaction, I had rather be master of my own time than wear a diadem.

George Berkeley
The fawning courtier and the surly squire often mean the same thing,—each his own interest.

George Berkeley
I might as well doubt of my own being, as of the being of those things I actually see and feel.

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

George Berkeley
Axiom. No reasoning about things whereof we have no idea. Therefore no reasoning about Infinitesimals.

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

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

George Berkeley
The same principles which at first view lead to scepticism, pursued to a certain point bring men back to common sense.

George Berkeley
Religion is the centre which unites, and the cement which connects the several parts of members of the political body.

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

George Berkeley
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.

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

George Berkeley
But he who can digest a second or third Fluxion, a second or third Difference, need not, methinks, be squeamish about any Point in Divinity.

George Berkeley
The method of Fluxions is the general key by help whereof the modern mathematicians unlock the secrets of Geometry, and consequently of Nature.

George Berkeley
[Tar water] is of a nature so mild and benign and proportioned to the human constitution, as to warm without heating, to cheer but not inebriate.

George Berkeley
These are sciences purely Verbal, & entirely useless but for Practise in Societys of Men. No speculative knowledge, no comparison of Ideas in them.

George Berkeley
But the velocities of the velocities - the second, third, fourth, and fifth velocities, etc. - exceed, if I mistake not, all human understanding...

George Berkeley
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.

George Berkeley