Top 60 George Berkeley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

— George Berkeley

2. “What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.”

— George Berkeley

3. “To be is to be perceived.”

— George Berkeley

4. “Few men think, yet all will have opinions.”

— George Berkeley

5. “To me it seems that liberty and virtue were made for each other. If any man wish to enslave his country, nothing is a fitter preparative than vice; and nothing leads to vice so surely as irreligion.”

— George Berkeley

6. “All men have opinions, but few think.”

— George Berkeley

7. “God is a being of transcendent and unlimited perfections: his nature therefore is incomprehensible to finite spirits.”

— George Berkeley

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

— George Berkeley

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

9. “Truth is the cry of all, but the game of few.”

— George Berkeley

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

— George Berkeley

11. “Esse est percipi.”

— George Berkeley

12. “Our youth we can have but to-day, We may always find time to grow old.”

— George Berkeley

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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.”

— George Berkeley

16. “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

17. “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

18. “A ray of imagination or of wisdom may enlighten the universe, and glow into remotest centuries.”

— George Berkeley

19. “It is impossible that a man who is false to his friends and neighbours should be true to the public.”

— George Berkeley

20. “The question between the materialists and me is not, whether things have a real existence out of the mind of this or that person, but whether they have an absolute existence, distinct from being perceived by God, and exterior to all minds.”

— George Berkeley

21. “Certainly he who can digest a second or third fluxion need not, methinks, be squeamish about any point in divinity.”

— George Berkeley

22. “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

23. “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

24. “How often must I repeat, that I know or am conscious of my own being; and that I myself am not my ideas, but somewhat else, a thinking, active principle that perceives, knows, wills, and operates about ideas?”

— George Berkeley

25. “The only things we perceive are our perceptions.”

— George Berkeley

26. “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.”

— George Berkeley

27. “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.”

— George Berkeley

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

— George Berkeley

29. “The fawning courtier and the surly squire often mean the same thing, – each his own interest.”

— George Berkeley

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

— George Berkeley

31. “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

32. “Whatever the world thinks, he who hath not much meditated upon God, the human soul, and the summum bonum, may possibly make a thriving earthworm, but will most indubitably make a sorry patriot and a sorry statesman.”

— George Berkeley

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

— George Berkeley

34. “There being in the make of an English mind a certain gloom and eagerness, which carries to the sad extreme; religion to fanaticism; free-thinking to atheism; liberty to rebellion.”

— George Berkeley

35. “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

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

— George Berkeley

37. “I do not deny the existence of material substance merely because I have no notion of it, but because the notion of it is inconsistent, or in other words, because it is repugnant that there should be a notion of it.”

— George Berkeley

38. “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

39. “In vain do we extend our view into the heavens, and pry into the entrails of the earth, in vain do we consult the writings of learned men, and trace the dark footsteps of antiquity; we need only draw the curtain of words, to behold the fairest tree of knowledge, whose fruit is excellent, and within the reach of our hand.”

— George Berkeley

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

— George Berkeley

41. “If what you mean by the word “matter” be only the unknown support of unknown qualities, it is no matter whether there is such a thing or no, since it no way concerns us; and I do not see the advantage there is in disputing about what we know not what, and we know not why.”

— George Berkeley

42. “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

43. “In short, if there were external bodies, it is impossible we should ever come to know it; and if there were not, we might have the very same reasons to think there were that we have now.”

— George Berkeley

44. “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

45. “Religion is the centre which unites, and the cement which connects the several parts of members of the political body.”

— George Berkeley

46. “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

47. “Whatever is immediately perceived is an idea: and can any idea exist out of the mind?”

— George Berkeley

48. “Where the people are well educated, the art of piloting a state is best learned from the writings of Plato.”

— George Berkeley

49. “Every knave is a thorough knave, and a thorough knave is a knave throughout.”

— George Berkeley

50. “All those who write either explicitly or by insinuation against the dignity, freedom, and immortality of the human soul, may so far forth be justly said to unhinge the principles of morality, and destroy the means of making men reasonably virtuous.”

— George Berkeley