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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!

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
May
Hypothesis
False
Disputation
Notion
Labyrinths
Ocean
Hypotheses
Fields
Labyrinth
Single
Doubts
Learning
Amusement
Doubt
Avoided

More quotes by 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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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?
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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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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.
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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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[Christianity] neither enjoins the nastiness of the Cynic, nor the insensibility of the Stoic.
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...?
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He who says there is no such thing as an honest man, you may be sure is himself a knave.
George Berkeley
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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.
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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For my own private satisfaction, I had rather be master of my own time than wear a diadem.
George Berkeley
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I might as well doubt of my own being, as of the being of those things I actually see and feel.
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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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
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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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We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.
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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Whatever is immediately perceived is an idea: and can any idea exist out of the mind?
George Berkeley