Quote

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.

David Hume

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Identity
Talking
Nature
Mind
Fictitious
Things
Ascribe
Belonging
Established
Peculiar

More quotes by David Hume

Image
All power, even the most despotic, rests ultimately on opinion.
David Hume
Image
Scholastic learning and polemical divinity retarded the growth of all true knowledge.
David Hume
Image
Every disastrous accident alarms us, and sets us on enquiries concerning the principles whence it arose: Apprehensions spring up with regard to futurity: And the mind, sunk into diffidence, terror, and melancholy, has recourse to every method of appeasing those secret intelligent powers, on whom our fortune is supposed entirely to depend.
David Hume
Image
Liberty of thinking, and of expressing our thoughts, is always fatal to priestly power, and to those pious frauds on which it is commonly founded.
David Hume
Image
Human happiness seems to consist in three ingredients: action, pleasure and indolence.
David Hume
Image
We need only reflect on what has been prov'd at large, that we are never sensible of any connexion betwixt causes and effects, and that 'tis only by our experience of their constant conjunction, we can arrive at any knowledge of this relation.
David Hume
Image
.. that a rule, which, in speculation, may seem the most advantageous to society, may yet be found, in practice, totally pernicious and destructive.
David Hume
Image
The chief benefit, which results from philosophy, arises in an indirect manner, and proceeds more from its secret, insensible influence, than from its immediate application.
David Hume
Image
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.
David Hume
Image
The mention of one apartment in a building naturally introduces an enquiry or discourse concerning the others: and if we think ofa wound, we can scarcely forbear reflecting on the pain which follows it.
David Hume
Image
Examine the religious principles which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded that they are other than sick men's dreams.
David Hume
Image
Convulsions in nature, disorders, prodigies, miracles, though the most opposite of the plan of a wise superintendent, impress mankind with the strongest sentiments of religion.
David Hume
Image
There is, indeed a more mitigated scepticism or academical philosophy, which may be both durable and useful, and which may, in part, be the result of this Pyrrhonism, or excessive scepticism, when its undistinguished doubts are corrected by common sense and reflection.
David Hume
Image
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.
David Hume
Image
Great pleasures are much less frequent than great pains.
David Hume
Image
To hate, to love, to think, to feel, to see all this is nothing but to perceive.
David Hume
Image
The greater part of mankind may be divided into two classes that of shallow thinkers who fall short of the truth and that of abstruse thinkers who go beyond it.
David Hume
Image
It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.
David Hume
Image
History is the discovering of the principles of human nature.
David Hume
Image
It is harder to avoid censure than to gain applause.
David Hume