George Berkeley Quotes

The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose.

Without words to objectify and categorize our sensations and place them in relation to one another, we cannot evolve a tradition of what is real in the world.

From the perspective of mere representation, the external world always remains only a phenomenon.

Intellectualism' is the belief that our mind comes upon a world complete in itself, and has the duty of ascertaining its contents; but has no power of re-determining its character, for that is already given.

The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects.

Everything is a reenactment. We are reenacting the world in the mind. The world is not inside there. It does not reside in the gray matter of the brain.

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

I have always been interested in that relationship between what happens in our head and what happens in the world.

Appearances to the mind are of four kinds. Things either are what they appear to be; or they neither are, nor appear to be; or they are, and do not appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be. Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man's task.

The appearance of things to the mind is the standard of every action to man.

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?

The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge.

Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.

External reality is sort of an affectation of the nervous system.

When you burn the chair, you suddenly realize that the chair in your mind did not burn or disappear

Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and control the triggerings of our sensory receptors in the light of previous triggering of our sensory receptors.

The map appears to us more real than the land.

Can I reject everything my brain experienced? Is intellectual understanding any understanding at all?

It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world colour and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I call "experience" is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind.

Could one imagine a stone's having consciousness? And if anyone can do so-why should that not merely prove that such image-mongery is of no interest to us?

Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.

All consciousness is consciousness of something: in thinking I am aware that my thought is 'pointing towards' some object.

The thought is not the thing.