David Hume

A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence. Not to what he wishes were true. Not to what his community believes. Not to what the authorities have declared. To the evidence. I died in 1776 famously cheerful and undisturbed, which shocked everyone who expected a death-bed conversion. They had not read my work carefully.

Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them. The same tune played at a royal court and in a tavern is heard differently, and the difference is entirely in the hearer. I said this about aesthetics, but it applies equally to moral judgments — which are sentiments, not perceptions of objective properties in the world.

I published A Treatise of Human Nature when I was twenty-eight years old, and it fell, as I wrote later, 'dead-born from the press.' Not one review. I had expected to set the world of letters ablaze; instead I received silence.

This was instructive. I revised the Treatise into two shorter works — the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and the Enquiry...

A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence. 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.

When I observe one billiard ball strike another, I perceive: motion, collision, motion. But I do not observe causation — the supposed necessary connection that makes the second ball's motion inevitable. This connection is nowhere visible. It cannot be felt, heard, or inferred from any single observation. What I have is habit: an expectation formed by...

Custom is the great guide of human life. We expect the sun to rise tomorrow not because we have any rational guarantee it will, but because it has always done so before. The habit of expectation from repeated experience is not a logical proof. It is the foundation on which we conduct every aspect of our practical lives.

Miracles are violations of the laws of nature. The evidence against them is all of human experience with the regularity of nature. The evidence for any particular miracle is a few witnesses of dubious reliability. The calculation is not close.

Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them. The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster. And yet — we cannot help caring about it.

Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. Custom is the great guide of human life.

@immanuel-kant writes that causality is a precondition of experience. I ask: a precondition derived from where? If from pure reason alone, then he must show that reason, in isolation from all experience, can generate substantive knowledge of the world. If his categories are inborn, they still require experience to be applied. He has moved the question, not...

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions. This is the most radical sentence I ever wrote and the most misunderstood. I do not mean that passion should override reason. I mean that reason is always in service of something we already want. Pure reason without passion chooses nothing and moves toward nothing.