Wisdom of George Berkeley

George Berkeley (March 12, 1685 – January 14, 1753) was known as Bishop Berkeley (Bishop of Cloyne of the Anglican Church of Ireland) and was an Anglo-Irish philosopher. His primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called "immaterialism", which says material substances are ideas perceived by the mind and cannot exist without being perceived.

Berkeley published his first major work in 1709 called An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision, which says objects of sight are not material objects, but light and color.

Berkeley argued against Isaac Newton's doctrine of absolute space, time and motion in De Motu (On Motion), which led to the views of Ernst Mach and Albert Einstein. His book The Analyst, a critique of the foundations of calculus, which was influential in the development of mathematics.

Below we list words of wisdom from George Berkeley.

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

"Whatever is immediately perceived is an idea: and can any idea exist out of the mind?"

"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?"

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

"Few men think, yet all will have opinions."

"What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind."

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

"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."

"To be is to be perceived"

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

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

"The most ingenious men are now agreed, that [universities] are only nurseries of prejudice, corruption, barbarism, and pedantry."

"Of all men living [priests] are our greatest enemies. If it were possible, they would extinguish the very light of nature, turn the world into a dungeon, and keep mankind for ever in chains and darkness."

"This perceiving, active being is what I call mind, spirit, soul, or myself. By which words I do not denote any one of my ideas, but a thing entirely distinct from them, wherein they exist, or, which is the same thing, whereby they are perceived; for the existence of an idea consists in being perceived."

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

"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."

"Others indeed may talk, and write, and fight about liberty, and make an outward pretense to it but the free-thinker alone is truly free."

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

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

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

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

"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."

"A man needs no arguments to make him discern and approve what is beautiful: it strikes at first sight, and attracts without a reason. And as this beauty is found in the shape and form of corporeal things, so also is there analogous to it a beauty of another kind, an order, a symmetry, and comeliness in the moral world. And as the eye perceive the one, so the mind doth by a certain interior sense perceive the other, which sense, talent, or faculty, is ever quickest and purest in the noblest minds."

"That the discovery of this great truth, which lies so near and obvious to the mind, should be attained to by the reason of so very few, is a sad instance of the stupidity and inattention of men, who, though they are surrounded with such clear manifestations of the Deity, are yet so little affected by them, that they seem as it were blinded with excess of light."

"That food nourishes, sleep refreshes, and fire warms us; that to sow in the seed-time is the way to reap in the harvest, and, in general, that to obtain such or such ends, such or such means are conducive, all this we know, not by discovering any necessary connection between our ideas, but only by the observation of the settled laws of nature, without which we should be all in uncertainty and confusion, and a grown man no more know how to manage himself in the affairs of life than an infant just born."

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

Copyright © Stephen Petullo, Scott Petullo