Quotes By David Hume

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

The rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reason.

Eloquence, at its highest pitch, leaves little room for reason or reflection, but addresses itself entirely to the desires and affections, captivating the willing hearers, and subduing their understanding.

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

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

Men often act knowingly against their interest.

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

A propensity to hope and joy is real riches; one to fear and sorrow real poverty.

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.

And what is the greatest number? Number one.

I have written on all sorts of subjects... yet I have no enemies; except indeed all the Whigs, all the Tories, and all the Christians.

No advantages in this world are pure and unmixed.

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

The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny.

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.

Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them.

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.

A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.

Truth springs from argument amongst friends.

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

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.

Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.