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

George Berkeley

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George Berkeley
Age: 67 †
Born: 1685
Born: March 12
Died: 1753
Died: January 14
Anglican Priest
Epistemologist
Metaphysician
Philosopher
Philosopher Of Science
Writer
Bishop Berkeley
Bishop George Berkeley
Oysters
Stupidity
Silly
Animals
Stupid
Animal
Oyster
Rather
Men
Senseless

More quotes by George Berkeley

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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
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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
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Religion is the centre which unites, and the cement which connects the several parts of members of the political body.
George Berkeley
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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
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[Christianity] neither enjoins the nastiness of the Cynic, nor the insensibility of the Stoic.
George Berkeley
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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
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We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.
George Berkeley
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Certainly he who can digest a second or third fluxion need not, methinks, be squeamish about any point in divinity.
George Berkeley
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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
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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
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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 Berkeley
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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
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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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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
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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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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
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Whatever is immediately perceived is an idea: and can any idea exist out of the mind?
George Berkeley
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What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.
George Berkeley
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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
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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