David Hume's Quotes

The law always limits every power it gives.

What a peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call 'thought'.

Avarice, the spur of industry.

Be a philosopher but, amid all your philosophy be still a man.

Custom is the great guide to human life.

Men are much oftener thrown on their knees by the melancholy than by the agreeable passions.

Philosophy would render us entirely Pyrrhonian, were not nature too strong for it.

Any person seasoned with a just sense of the imperfections of natural reason, will fly to revealed truth with the greatest avidity.

Beauty, whether moral or natural, is felt, more properly than perceived.

Belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain.

Everything in the world is purchased by labor.

Human Nature is the only science of man; and yet has been hitherto the most neglected.

It is a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave.

It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.

It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.

It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.

No advantages in this world are pure and unmixed.

Nothing endears so much a friend as sorrow for his death. The pleasure of his company has not so powerful an influence.

The advantages found in history seem to be of three kinds, as it amuses the fancy, as it improves the understanding, and as it strengthens virtue.

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.

This avidity alone, of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends, is insatiable, perpetual, universal, and directly destructive of society.

Every wise, just, and mild government, by rendering the condition of its subjects easy and secure, will always abound most in people, as well as in commodities and riches.

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.

There is a very remarkable inclination in human nature to bestow on external objects the same emotions which it observes in itself, and to find every where those ideas which are most present to it.

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.

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.