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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.

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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Edinburgh
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The greatest crimes have been found, in many instances, to be compatible with a superstitious piety and devotion hence it is justly regarded as unsafe to draw any inference in favor of a man's morals, from the fervor or strictness of his religious exercises, even though he himself believe them sincere.
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Time is a perishable commodity.
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He is happy whom circumstances suit his temper but he Is more excellent who suits his temper to any circumstance.
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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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God is an ever-present spirit guiding all that happens to a wise and holy end.
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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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An infinite number of real parts of time, passing in succession, and exhausted one after another, appears so evident a contradiction, that no man, one should think, whose judgement is not corrupted, instead of being improved, by the sciences, would ever be able to admit of it.
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.. the voice of nature and experience seems plainly to oppose the selfish theory.
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It is with books as with women, where a certain plainness of manner and of dress is more engaging than that glare of paint and airs and apparel which may dazzle the eye, but reaches not the affections.
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Avarice, the spur of industry.
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Everything in the world is purchased by labor.
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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.
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What praise is implied in the simple epithet useful! What reproach in the contrary.
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Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.
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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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Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the press.
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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 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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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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Municipal laws are a supply to the wisdom of each individual and, at the same time, by restraining the natural liberty of men, make private interest submit to the interest of the public.
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