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

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
Scholastics
True
Retard
Retarded
Divinity
Philosophical
Growth
Polemical
Learning
Scholastic
Knowledge

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Custom, then, is the great guide of human life. It is that principle alone, which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past.
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A man posing for a painting.
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All inferences from experience... are effects of custom, not of reasoning.
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From causes which appear similar, we expect similar effects. This is the sum total of all our experimental conclusions.
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But it is a miracle that a dead man should come to life because that has never been observed in any age or country.
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Let us fix our attention out of ourselves as much as possible let us chase our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of existence, but those perceptions, which have appeared in that narrow compass.
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I may venture to affirm the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.
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It is more rational to suspect knavery and folly than to discount, at a stroke, everything that past experience has taught me about the way things actually work
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It is... a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave.
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The feelings of our heart, the agitation of our passions, the vehemence of our affections, dissipate all its conclusions, and reduce the profound philosopher to a mere plebeian
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A purpose, an intention, a design, strikes everywhere even the careless, the most stupid thinker.
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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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Nothing endears so much a friend as sorrow for his death. The pleasure of his company has not so powerful an influence.
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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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It is harder to avoid censure than to gain applause.
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Liberty of any kind is never lost all at once.
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I never asserted such an absurd thing as that things arise without a cause.
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Nothing is demonstrable, unless the contrary implies a contradiction. Nothing, that is distinctly conceivable, implies a contradiction. Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent. There is no being, therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction. Consequently there is no being, whose existence is demonstrable.
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It seems certain, that though a man, in a flush of humour, after intense reflection on the many contradictions and imperfections of human reason, may entirely renounce all belief and opinion, it is impossible for him to persevere in this total scepticism, or make it appear in his conduct for a few hours.
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The most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation.
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