Where the people are well educated, the art of piloting a state is best learned from the writings of Plato.
It is impossible that a man who is false to his friends and neighbours should be true to the public.
Religion is the centre which unites, and the cement which connects the several parts of members of the political body.
So long as I confine my thoughts to my own ideas divested of words, I do not see how I can be easily mistaken.
I had rather be an oyster than a man, the most stupid and senseless of animals.
A mind at liberty to reflect on its own observations, if it produce nothing useful to the world, seldom fails of entertainment to itself.
Few men think, yet all will have opinions.
All men have opinions, but few think.
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.
Truth is the cry of all, but the game of few.
Many things, for aught I know, may exist, whereof neither I nor any other man hath or can have any idea or notion whatsoever.
Whatever is immediately perceived is an idea: and can any idea exist out of the mind?
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.
That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow.
To be is to be perceived.
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.
But the velocities of the velocities – the second, third, fourth, and fifth velocities, etc. – exceed, if I mistake not, all human understanding...
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.
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.
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.