David Hume
David Hume
David Hume– 25 August 1776) or David Homewas a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, who is best known today for his highly influential system of radical philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism...
NationalityScottish
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth7 May 1711
past events morality
It is still open for me, as well as you, to regulate my behavior, by my experience of past events.
past experience events
Custom, then, is the great guide of human life. It is that principle alone, which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past.
men events prejudice
It affords a violent prejudice against almost every science, that no prudent man, however sure of his principles, dares prophesy concerning any event, or foretell the remote consequences of things.
battle usual events
Battles, revolutions, pestilence, famine, and death, are never the effect of those natural causes, which we experience. Prodigies,omens, oracles, judgments, quite obscure the few natural events, that are intermingled with them. But as the former grow thinner every pagewe soon learn, that there is nothing mysterious or supernatural in the case, but that all proceeds from the usual propensity of mankind towards the marvellous, and that, though this inclination may at intervals receive a check from sense and learning, it can never be thoroughly extirpated.
ideas firsts events
The first ideas of religion arose, not from contemplation of the works of nature, but from a concern with regard to the events of life.
healing start takes together
It's when we start working together that the real healing takes place, ... It's when we start spilling our sweat, and not our blood.
custom great guide human
Custom, then, is the great guide of human life.
implies less rise sun
That the sun will not rise to-morrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise.
everywhere strikes stupid thinker
A purpose, an intention, a design, strikes everywhere the careless, the most stupid thinker
incapable poor principles
The slaving poor are incapable of any principles
avenues either esteemed leads life mankind open path remove science sweetest whoever
The sweetest and most inoffensive path of life leads through the avenues of science and learning; and whoever can either remove any obstruction in this way, or open up any new prospect, ought, so far, to be esteemed a benefactor to mankind
affairs appears consider ease few governed human surprising
Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the ease with which the many are governed by the few
character government law
How could politics be a science, if laws and forms of government had not a uniform influence upon society? Where would be the foundation of morals, if particular characters had no certain or determinate power to produce particular sentiments, and if these sentiments had no constant operation on actions?
beauty reflection mind
If the contemplation, even of inanimate beauty, is so delightful; if it ravishes the senses, even when the fair form is foreign tous: What must be the effects of moral beauty? And what influence must it have, when it embellishes our own mind, and is the result of our own reflection and industry?