71+ George Berkeley Quotes On Education, Religion And Free Will

George Berkeley was an Irish philosopher and bishop in the Anglican Church. He is best known for his theory of immaterialism, which holds that physical objects exist only as ideas in the minds of perceivers. Berkeley's ideas had a major influence on the development of modern philosophy and empiricism. Following is our collection on famous quotes by George Berkeley on education, religion, life.

Top 10 George Berkeley Quotes

1. 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.
2. It is impossible that a man who is false to his friends and neighbours should be true to the public.
3. Few men think, yet all will have opinions.
4. What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.
5. I had rather be an oyster than a man, the most stupid and senseless of animals.
6. So long as I confine my thoughts to my own ideas divested of words, I do not see how I can be easily mistaken.
7. 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.
8. Where the people are well educated, the art of piloting a state is best learned from the writings of Plato.
9. Every knave is a thorough knave, and a thorough knave is a knave throughout.
10. The most ingenious men are now agreed, that [universities] are only nurseries of prejudice, corruption, barbarism, and pedantry.

George Berkeley Short Quotes

• [Christianity] neither enjoins the nastiness of the Cynic, nor the insensibility of the Stoic.
• 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.
• The fawning courtier and the surly squire often mean the same thing,--each his own interest.
• Truth is the cry of all, but the game of few.
• He who says there is no such thing as an honest man, you may be sure is himself a knave.
• To be is to be perceived
• A ray of imagination or of wisdom may enlighten the universe, and glow into remotest centuries.
• For my own private satisfaction, I had rather be master of my own time than wear a diadem.
• All men have opinions, but few think.

George Berkeley Quotes About Religion

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

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

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 Berkeley

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

George Berkeley Quotes About Mind

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. — George Berkeley

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

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. — 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

The question between the materialists and me is not, whether things have a real existence out of the mind of this or that person, but whether they have an absolute existence, distinct from being perceived by God, and exterior to all minds. — George Berkeley

Doth the Reality of sensible things consist in being perceived? or, is it something distinct from their being perceived, and that bears no relation to the mind? — George Berkeley

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

George Berkeley Quotes About World

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. — George Berkeley

Whatever the world thinks, he who hath not much meditated upon God, the human soul, and the summum bonum, may possibly make a thriving earthworm, but will most indubitably make a sorry patriot and a sorry statesman. — 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

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. — George Berkeley

The world is like a board with holes in it, and the square men have got into the round holes, and the round into the square. — George Berkeley

George Berkeley Quotes About Exist

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. — George Berkeley

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? — 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

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

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. — George Berkeley

George Berkeley Quotes About Liberty

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. — 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

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

George Berkeley Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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 the ghosts of departed quantities...? — George Berkeley

The eye by long use comes to see even in the darkest cavern: and there is no subject so obscure but we may discern some glimpse of truth by long poring on it. — 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

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

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

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

But, say you, surely there is nothing easier than for me to imagine trees, for instance, in a park [. . .] and nobody by to perceive them. [...] The objects of sense exist only when they are perceived; the trees therefore are in the garden [. . .] no longer than while there is somebody by to perceive them. — George Berkeley

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

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

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. — 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

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. — 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

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 Berkeley

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

Colour, Figure, Motion, Extension and the like, considered only so many Sensations in the Mind, are perfectly known, there being nothing in them which is not perceived. But if they are looked on as notes or Images, referred to Things or Archetypes existing without the Mind, then are we involved all in Scepticism. — George Berkeley

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

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

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 Berkeley

Certainly he who can digest a second or third fluxion need not, methinks, be squeamish about any point in divinity. — George Berkeley

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? — 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

Whose fault is it if poor Ireland still continues poor? — George Berkeley

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 our selves. That we have first raised a dust, and then complain, we cannot see. — George Berkeley

Life Lessons by George Berkeley

1. George Berkeley believed that the only thing that truly exists is the mind, and that everything else is an idea or perception of the mind. This teaches us to be mindful of our thoughts and to be aware of our perceptions of the world.
2. Berkeley also believed that the only way to gain knowledge was through experience, teaching us to be open to new experiences and to learn from them.
3. He also believed that we should strive to be generous and kind to others, and to be of service to our communities, reminding us of the importance of helping those around us.