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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

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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
Fall
Perceived
Doe
Forest
Make
Falls
Forests
Philosophical
Tree
Hear
Sound
Esse

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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.
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[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.
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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.
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Every knave is a thorough knave, and a thorough knave is a knave throughout.
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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!
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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.
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Certainly he who can digest a second or third fluxion need not, methinks, be squeamish about any point in divinity.
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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.
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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?
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God is a being of transcendent and unlimited perfections: his nature therefore is incomprehensible to finite spirits.
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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.
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He who says there is no such thing as an honest man, you may be sure is himself a knave.
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The same principles which at first view lead to skepticism, pursued to a certain point, bring men back to common sense.
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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.
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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.
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For my own private satisfaction, I had rather be master of my own time than wear a diadem.
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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.
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The fawning courtier and the surly squire often mean the same thing,--each his own interest.
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It is impossible that a man who is false to his friends and neighbours should be true to the public.
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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.
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