Few men think, yet all will have opinions.
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.
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.
A ray of imagination or of wisdom may enlighten the universe, and glow into remotest centuries.
To be is to be perceived
We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.
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.
To be a good patriot, a man must consider his countrymen as God's creatures, and himself as accountable for his acting towards them.
The most ingenious men are now agreed, that [universities] are only nurseries of prejudice, corruption, barbarism, and pedantry.
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.
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.
I had rather be an oyster than a man, the most stupid and senseless of animals.
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.
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.
God is a being of transcendent and unlimited perfections: his nature therefore is incomprehensible to finite spirits.
Every knave is a thorough knave, and a thorough knave is a knave throughout.
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.
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?
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.
All men have opinions, but few think.
Where the people are well educated, the art of piloting a state is best learned from the writings of Plato.
That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow.
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