Quotes By David Hume

Character is the result of a system of stereotyped principals.

The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny.

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.

Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them.

It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.

He is happy whom circumstances suit his temper; but he Is more excellent who suits his temper to any circumstance.

Scholastic learning and polemical divinity retarded the growth of all true knowledge.

This avidity alone, of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends, is insatiable, perpetual, universal, and directly destructive of society.

There is a very remarkable inclination in human nature to bestow on external objects the same emotions which it observes in itself, and to find every where those ideas which are most present to it.

Be a philosopher but, amid all your philosophy be still a man.

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.

The advantages found in history seem to be of three kinds, as it amuses the fancy, as it improves the understanding, and as it strengthens virtue.

The corruption of the best things gives rise to the worst.

Custom is the great guide to human life.

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.

What a peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call 'thought'.

The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.

To hate, to love, to think, to feel, to see; all this is nothing but to perceive.

Nothing endears so much a friend as sorrow for his death. The pleasure of his company has not so powerful an influence.

The rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reason.

Eloquence, at its highest pitch, leaves little room for reason or reflection, but addresses itself entirely to the desires and affections, captivating the willing hearers, and subduing their understanding.

Any person seasoned with a just sense of the imperfections of natural reason, will fly to revealed truth with the greatest avidity.

It is a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave.

Philosophy would render us entirely Pyrrhonian, were not nature too strong for it.

A propensity to hope and joy is real riches; one to fear and sorrow real poverty.

There is not to be found, in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good sense, education and learning, as to secure us against all delusion in themselves.

I have written on all sorts of subjects... yet I have no enemies; except indeed all the Whigs, all the Tories, and all the Christians.

Accuracy is, in every case, advantageous to beauty, and just reasoning to delicate sentiment. In vain would we exalt the one by depreciating the other.

And what is the greatest number? Number one.

No advantages in this world are pure and unmixed.