Quotes About Hume

Bishop Berkeley destroyed this world in one volume octavo; and nothing remained, after his time, but mind; which experienced a similar fate from the hand of Mr. Hume in 1737.

Poor David Hume is dying fast, but with more real cheerfulness and good humor and with more real resignation to the necessary course of things, than any whining Christian ever dyed with pretended resignation to the will of God.

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

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.

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

A purpose, an intention, a design, strikes everywhere even the careless, the most stupid thinker.

T]he Old Testament, [...] if considered as a general rule of conduct, would lead to consequences destructive of all principles of humanity and morality.

Rousseau is] the person whom I most revere both for the Force of [his] Genius and the Greatness of [his] mind [...]

Beyond the constant conjunction of similar objects, and the consequent inference from one to the other, we have no notion of any necessity, or connexion.

reasonings on this subject can only be drawn from effects to causes; and that every argument, deducted from causes to effects, must of necessity be a gross sophism; since it is impossible for you to know anything of the cause, but what you have antecedently, not inferred, but discovered to the full, in the effect.

with what assurance can we decide concerning the origin of worlds or trace their history from eternity to eternity?

La creencia debe agradar a la imaginación por medio de la fuerza y vivacidad que la acompaña, ya que toda idea que posee fuerza y vivacidad encontramos que es agradable a esta facultad.

No tenemos una idea perfecta de nada más que de una percepción. Una substancia es enteramente diferente de una percepción. Por consiguiente, no tenemos una idea de substancia.

It is an absurdity to believe that the Deity has human passions, and one of the lowest of human passions, a restless appetite for applause

If in the neighborhood of the commercial and literary town of Glasgow a race of cannibals really existed, we may contemplate in the period of the Scottish history the opposite extremes of savage and civilised life. Such reflections tend to enlarge the circle of our ideas, and to encourage the pleasing hope that New Zealand may produce in some future age the Hume of the Southern Hemisphere.

Hume decreed that "Liberty is the perfection of society," but believed equally that "authority must be acknowledged as essential to its [freedom's] very existence.

It will be evident to you that I am here controverting the most cherished tradition of modern philosophy, shared alike by the school of empiricists which derives from Hume, and the school of transcendental idealists which derives from Kant.

My whole account of positive epistemic status, not just this example, owes much to Thomas Reid with his talk of faculties and their functions and his rejection of the notion (one he attributes to Hume and his predecessors) that self-evident propositions and propositions about one's own immediate experience are the only properly basic propositions.

My whole account of positive epistemic status owes much to Thomas Reid with his talk of faculties and their functions and his rejection of the notion (one he attributes to Hume and his predecessors) that self-evident propositions and propositions about one's own immediate experience are the only properly basic propositions.

Again, the traditional system works, for traditional society. A mass made of people who have intense curiosity about why Beethoven went in for string quartets after the Ninth Symphony, or whether Kant really refuted Hume satisfactorily, or what the latest quantum theories mean in relation to Determinism and Free Will, is not a mass that will easily be led into dull, dehumanizing labor at traditional jobs.

In the days of Locke, Hume and Voltaire humanists argued that 'God is a product of the human imagination'. Dataism now gives humanists a taste of their own medicine, and tells them: 'Yes, God is a product of the human imagination, but human imagination in turn is just the product of biochemical algorithms.

If one accepts the premise that all knowledge comes to us through our senses, Hume says, then one must logically conclude that both 'Nature' and 'Nature's laws' are creations of our own imagination.

What [Adam] Smith took from [David] Hume's demonstration of the limits of reason, the absurdity of superstition, and the primacy of the passions was not a lesson of Buddhist-Stoical indifference but something more like a sense of Epicurean intensity—if we are living in the material world, then let us make it our material.