GEORGE BERKELEY

The same principles which at first view lead to skepticism, pursued to a certain point, bring men back to common sense.

He who says there is no such thing as an honest man, you may be sure is himself a knave.

We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.

I had rather be an oyster than a man, the most stupid and senseless of animals.

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.

A mind at liberty to reflect on its own observations, if it produce nothing useful to the world, seldom fails of entertainment to itself.

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.

So long as I confine my thoughts to my own ideas divested of words, I do not see how I can be easily mistaken.

That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow.

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.

Many things, for aught I know, may exist, whereof neither I nor any other man hath or can have any idea or notion whatsoever.

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.

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.

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.

It is impossible that a man who is false to his friends and neighbors should be true to the public.

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, it makes no sound.

Truth is the cry of all, but the game of the few.

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

All our measures should tend towards the immediate encouragement of our woolen manufactures, which must be looked upon as the basis of our wealth.

Universities are only nurseries of prejudice, corruption, barbarism, and pedantry

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.

I am apt to think, if we knew what it was to be an angel for one hour, we should return to this world, though it were to sit on the brightest throne in it, with vastly more loathing and reluctance than we would now descend into a loathsome dungeon or sepulchre.

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...?

To be a good patriot, a man must consider his countrymen as God's creatures, and himself as accountable for his acting towards them.

Did men but consider that the sun, moon, and stars, and every other object of the senses, are only so many sensations in their minds, which have no other existence but barely being perceived, doubtless they would never fall down and worship their own ideas; but rather address their homage to that eternal invisible Mind which produces and sustains all things.