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?
Few men think, yet all will have opinions.
What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.
Truth is the cry of all, but the game of few.
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.
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.
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.
To be a good patriot, a man must consider his countrymen as God's creatures, and himself as accountable for his acting towards them.
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.
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.
Our youth we can have but to-day, We may always find time to grow old.
All men have opinions, but few think.
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.
I had rather be an oyster than a man, the most stupid and senseless of animals.
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.
Where the people are well educated, the art of piloting a state is best learned from the writings of Plato.
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 veryfew, 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 connexion 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.
Every knave is a thorough knave, and a thorough knave is a knave throughout.
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