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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.

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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We may well ask, What causes induce us to believe in the existence of body? but 'tis vain to ask. Whether there be body or not? That is a point which we must take for granted in all our reasonings.
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And whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.
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Nothing is so improving to the temper as the study of the beauties either of poetry, eloquence, music, or painting.
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The gazing populace receive greedily, without examination, whatever soothes superstition and promotes wonder.
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Men are much oftener thrown on their knees by the melancholy than by the agreeable passions.
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The ages of greatest public spirit are not always eminent for private virtue.
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Virtue, like wholesome food, is better than poisons, however corrected.
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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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Grief and disappointment give rise to anger, anger to envy, envy to malice, and malice to grief again, till the whole circle be completed.
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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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Every movement of the theater by a skilful poet is communicated, as it were, by magic, to the spectators who weep, tremble, resent, rejoice, and are inflamed with all the variety of passions which actuate the several personages of the drama.
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Philosophy would render us entirely Pyrrhonian, were not nature too strong for it.
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All inferences from experience... are effects of custom, not of reasoning.
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Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous those in philosophy only ridiculous.
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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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History is the discovering of the principles of human nature.
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It seems to me, that the only Objects of the abstract Sciences or of Demonstration is Quantity and Number, and that all Attempts to extend this more perfect Species of Knowledge beyond these Bounds are mere Sophistry and Illusion.
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Liberty of any kind is never lost all at once.
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It forms a strong presumption against all supernatural and miraculous relations, that they are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations or if a civilized people has ever given admission to any of them, that people will be found to have received them from ignorant and barbarous ancestors.
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