Quotes by George Berkeley

• So long as I confine my thoughts to my own ideas divested of words, I do not see how I can be easily mistaken.
• A mind at liberty to reflect on its own observations, if it produce nothing useful to the world, seldom fails of entertainment to itself.
• The same principles which at first view lead to skepticism, pursued to a certain point, bring men back to common sense.
• 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.
• We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.
• 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.
• That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow.
• Truth is the cry of all, but the game of few.
• Many things, for aught I know, may exist, whereof neither I nor any other man hath or can have any idea or notion whatsoever.
• He who says there is no such thing as an honest man, you may be sure is himself a knave.
• 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.
• I had rather be an oyster than a man, the most stupid and senseless of animals.
• 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.
• Others indeed may talk, and write, and fight about liberty, and make an outward pretence to it; but the free-thinker alone is truly free.
• 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.