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If morality had naturally no influence on human passions and actions, it were in vain to take such pains to inculcate it and nothing would be more fruitless than that multitude of rules and precepts with which all moralists abound.

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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No quality of human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and in its consequences, than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own.
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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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Heroism, or military glory, is much admired by the generality of mankind. They consider it as the most sublime kind of merit. Menof cool reflection are not so sanguine in their praises of it.
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Nothing is more favorable to the rise of politeness and learning, than a number of neighboring and independent states, connected together by commerce and policy.
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Habit may lead us to belief and expectation but not to the knowledge, and still less to the understanding, of lawful relations.
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Almost every one has a predominant inclination, to which his other desires and affections submit, and which governs him, though perhaps with some intervals, though the whole course of his life.
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Rousseau was mad but influential Hume was sane but had no followers.
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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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Among the arts of conversation no one pleases more than mutual deference or civility, which leads us to resign our own inclinations to those of our companions, and to curb and conceal that presumption and arrogance so natural to the human mind.
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Be a philosopher but, amid all your philosophy be still a man.
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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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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.
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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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A purpose, an intention, a design, strikes everywhere even the careless, the most stupid thinker.
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.. that which renders morality an active principle and constitutes virtue our happiness, and vice our misery: it is probable, I say, that this final sentence depends on some internal sense or feeling, which nature has made universal in the whole species.
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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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There is nothing, in itself, valuable or despicable, desirable or hateful, beautiful or deformed but that these attributes arise from the particular constitution and fabric of human sentiment and affection.
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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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The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.
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There is no such thing as freedom of choice unless there is freedom to refuse.
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