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Though experience be our only guide in reasoning concerning matters of fact it must be acknowledged, that this guide is not altogether infallible, but in some cases is apt to lead us into errors.

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
Scotland
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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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Scholastic learning and polemical divinity retarded the growth of all true knowledge.
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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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Rousseau was mad but influential Hume was sane but had no followers.
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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.
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All morality depends upon our sentiments and when any action or quality of the mind pleases us after a certain manner we say it is virtuous and when the neglect or nonperformance of it displeases us after a like manner, we say that we lie under an obligation to perform it.
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Men often act knowingly against their interest.
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What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call thought, that we must thus make it the model of the whole universe? Our partiality in our own favour does indeed present it on all occasions but sound philosophy ought carefully to guard against so natural an illusion.
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.. the voice of nature and experience seems plainly to oppose the selfish theory.
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If the religious spirit be ever mentioned in any historical narration, we are sure to meet afterwards with a detail of the miseries which attend it. And no period of time can be happier or more prosperous, than those in which it is never regarded or heard of.
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The law always limits every power it gives.
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What praise is implied in the simple epithet useful! What reproach in the contrary.
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It is certain that the easy and obvious philosophy will always, with the generality of mankind, have preference above the accurate.
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To be a philosophical sceptic is, in a man of letters, the first and most essential to being a sound, believing Christian.
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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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Accuracy is, in every case, advantageous to beauty, and just reasoning to delicate sentiment. In vain would we exalt the one by depreciating the other.
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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.
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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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A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.
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