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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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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
Things
Doubt
Existence
Actually
Wells
Might
Well
Feel
Feels

More quotes by George Berkeley

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It is impossible that a man who is false to his friends and neighbours should be true to the public.
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?
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 method of Fluxions is the general key by help whereof the modern mathematicians unlock the secrets of Geometry, and consequently of Nature.
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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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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[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
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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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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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[Christianity] neither enjoins the nastiness of the Cynic, nor the insensibility of the Stoic.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.
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