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

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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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We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.
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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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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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[Christianity] neither enjoins the nastiness of the Cynic, nor the insensibility of the Stoic.
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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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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.
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Religion is the centre which unites, and the cement which connects the several parts of members of the political body.
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The method of Fluxions is the general key by help whereof the modern mathematicians unlock the secrets of Geometry, and consequently of Nature.
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Truth is the cry of all, but the game of few.
George Berkeley
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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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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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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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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 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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The fawning courtier and the surly squire often mean the same thing,--each his own interest.
George Berkeley
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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
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Every knave is a thorough knave, and a thorough knave is a knave throughout.
George Berkeley
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God is a being of transcendent and unlimited perfections: his nature therefore is incomprehensible to finite spirits.
George Berkeley
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For my own private satisfaction, I had rather be master of my own time than wear a diadem.
George Berkeley