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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.

David Hume

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David Hume
Age: 65 †
Born: 1711
Born: April 26
Died: 1776
Died: August 25
Economist
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Historian
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Philosopher
Writer
Edinburgh
Scotland
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Hume
Different
Perpetual
Inconceivable
Perception
Bundles
Succeed
Flux
Mankind
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Movement
Perceptions
Rest
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Avarice, the spur of industry.
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History is the discovering of the principles of human nature.
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I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the Whites. There scarcely ever was a civilization of their complexion, nor even any individual, eminent either in action or speculation.
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Scholastic learning and polemical divinity retarded the growth of all true knowledge.
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The whole of natural theologyresolves itself into one simple, though somewhat ambiguous proposition, That the cause or causesof order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence.
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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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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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Enthusiasm, being the infirmity of bold and ambitious tempers, is naturally accompanied with a spirit of liberty as superstition,on the contrary, renders men tame and abject, and fits them for slavery.
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Men often act knowingly against their interest.
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I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another.
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Vanity is so closely allied to virtue, and to love the fame of laudable actions approaches so near the love of laudable actions for their own sake, that these passions are more capable of mixture than any other kinds of affection and it is almost impossible to have the latter without some degree of the former.
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Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.
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Beauty, whether moral or natural, is felt, more properly than perceived.
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the senses alone are not implicitly to be depended on. We must correct their evidence by reason, and by considerations, derived from the nature of the medium, the distance of the object, and the disposition of the organ, in order to render them, within their sphere, the proper criteria of truth and falsehood.
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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 forming of general maxims from particular observation is a very nice operation and nothing is more usual, from haste or a narrowness of mind, which sees not on all sides, than to commit mistakes in this particular.
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Art may make a suite of clothes, but nature must produce a man.
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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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[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 not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.
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