Words matter. These are the best David Hume Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
He is happy whom circumstances suit his temper; but he Is more excellent who suits his temper to any circumstance.
Heaven and hell suppose two distinct species of men, the good and the bad. But the greatest part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue.
The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny.
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.
Any person seasoned with a just sense of the imperfections of natural reason, will fly to revealed truth with the greatest avidity.
Human Nature is the only science of man; and yet has been hitherto the most neglected.
Custom is the great guide to human life.
Be a philosopher but, amid all your philosophy be still a man.
The corruption of the best things gives rise to the worst.
Everything in the world is purchased by labor.
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.
Philosophy would render us entirely Pyrrhonian, were not nature too strong for it.
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.
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.
Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.
The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.
To hate, to love, to think, to feel, to see; all this is nothing but to perceive.
Every wise, just, and mild government, by rendering the condition of its subjects easy and secure, will always abound most in people, as well as in commodities and riches.
Avarice, the spur of industry.
It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.
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.
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.
That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise.
Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.
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.
It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.
A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.
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.
What a peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call ‘thought’.
It’s when we start working together that the real healing takes place… it’s when we start spilling our sweat, and not our blood.
And what is the greatest number? Number one.
The rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reason.
Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them.