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

David Hume

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David Hume
Age: 65 †
Born: 1711
Born: April 26
Died: 1776
Died: August 25
Economist
Essayist
Historian
Librarian
Philosopher
Writer
Edinburgh
Scotland
David Home
Hume
Philosophical
Rise
Gives
Worst
Best
Giving
Things
Corruption

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We make allowance for a certain degree of selfishness in men because we know it to be inseparable from human nature, and inherent in our frame and constitution. By this reflexion we correct those sentiments of blame, which so naturally arise upon any opposition.
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Between married persons, the cement of friendship is by the laws supposed so strong as to abolish all division of possessions: andhas often, in reality, the force ascribed to it.
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..when, in my philosophical disquisitions, I deny a providence and a future state, I undermine not the foundations of society, but advance principles, which they themselves, upon their own topics, if they argue consistently, must allow to be solid and satisfactory.
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A CAUSE is an object precedent and contiguous to another, and so united with it that the idea of the one determines the mind to form the idea of the other, and the impression of the one to form a more lively idea of the other.
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In the sphere of natural investigation, as in poetry and painting, the delineation of that which appeals most strongly to the imagination, derives its collective interest from the vivid truthfulness with which the individual features are portrayed.
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If God is omnipotent, omniscient and wholly good, whence evil? If God wills to prevent evil but cannot, then He is not omnipotent. If He can prevent evil but does not, then he is not good. In either case he is not God.
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The identity that we ascribe to things is only a fictitious one, established by the mind, not a peculiar nature belonging to what we’re talking about.
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Reasoning from the common course of nature, and without supposing any new interposition of the Supreme Cause, which ought always to be excluded from philosophy what is incorruptible must also be ingenerable. The soul, therefore, if immortal, existed before our birth: And if the former existence noways concerned us, neither will the latter.
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The most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation.
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All this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us the by senses and experience.
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Men are much oftener thrown on their knees by the melancholy than by the agreeable passions.
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Nothing more powerfully excites any affection than to conceal some part of its object, by throwing it into a kind of shade, whichat the same time that it shows enough to prepossess us in favour of the object, leaves still some work for the imagination.
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The whole [of religion] is a riddle, an ænigma, an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspence of judgment appear the onlyresult of our most accurate scrutiny, concerning this subject.
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Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the press.
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What is easy and obvious is never valued and even what is in itself difficult, if we come to knowledge of it without difficulty, and without and stretch of thought or judgment, is but little regarded.
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[A person’s] utmost art and industry can never equal the meanest of nature's productions, either for beauty or value.
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The religious hypothesis, therefore, must be considered only as a particular method of accounting for the visible phenomena of the universe: but no just reasoner will ever presume to infer from it any single fact, and alter or add to the phenomena, in any single particular.
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Every movement of the theater by a skilful poet is communicated, as it were, by magic, to the spectators who weep, tremble, resent, rejoice, and are inflamed with all the variety of passions which actuate the several personages of the drama.
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It is harder to avoid censure than to gain applause.
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Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.
David Hume