Quotes from David Hume

There is not to be found, in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good sense, education and learning, as to secure us against all delusion in themselves.

Do you come to a philosopher as to a cunning man, to learn something by magic or witchcraft, beyond what can be known by common prudence and discretion?

I cannot but bless the memory of Julius Caesar, for the great esteem he expressed for fat men and his aversion to lean ones.

The identity that we ascribe to things is only a fictitious one, established by the mind, not a peculiar nature belonging to what we're talking about.

History is the discovering of the principles of human nature.

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

Art may make a suite of clothes, but nature must produce a man.

Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the press.

[A personÂ's] utmost art and industry can never equal the meanest of nature's productions, either for beauty or value.

Happy the man whom indulgent fortune allows to pay to virtue what he owes to nature, and to make a generous gift of what must otherwise be ravished from him by cruel necessity.

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

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

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.

It is certain that the easy and obvious philosophy will always, with the generality of mankind, have preference above the accurate.

Nothing is so improving to the temper as the study of the beauties either of poetry, eloquence, music, or painting.

Liberty of any kind is never lost all at once.

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

All power, even the most despotic, rests ultimately on opinion.

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.

Truth springs from argument amongst friends.

Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature.

Luxury is a word of uncertain signification, and may be taken in a good as in a bad sense

The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.

What praise is implied in the simple epithet useful! What reproach in the contrary