David Hume Quotes

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.

He is happy whose circumstances suit his temper but he is more excellent who can suit his temper to any circumstances.

Art may make a suit of clothes; but nature must produce a man.

A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.

A wise man's kingdom is his own breast: or, if he ever looks farther, it will only be to the judgment of a select few, who are free from prejudices, and capable of examining his work.

The richest genius, like the most fertile soil, when uncultivated, shoots up into the rankest weeds.

I say, then, that belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain

The great end of all human industry, is the attainment of happiness. For this were arts invented, sciences cultivated, laws ordained, and societies modelled, by the most profound wisdom of patriots and legislators.

If nature has been frugal in her gifts and endowments, there is the more need of art to supply her defects.

A propensity to hope and joy is real riches: One to fear and sorrow, real poverty.

Custom, then, is the great guide of human life.

Where men are the most sure and arrogant, they are commonly the most mistaken, and have there given reins to passion, without that proper deliberation and suspense, which can alone secure them from the grossest absurdities.

By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will.

Hypothetical liberty is allowed to everyone who is not a prisoner and in chains

That the sun will not rise to-morrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise.

Does a man of sense run after every silly tale of hobgoblins or fairies, and canvass particularly the evidence? I never knew anyone, that examined and deliberated about nonsense who did not believe it before the end of his enquiries.

Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.

Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

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