DAVID HUME

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.

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

To hate, to love, to think, to feel, to see; all this is nothing but to perceive.

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

The advantages found in history seem to be of three kinds, as it amuses the fancy, as it improves the understanding, and as it strengthens virtue.

Scholastic learning and polemical divinity retarded the growth of all true knowledge.

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

Character is the result of a system of stereotyped principals.

Avarice, the spur of industry.

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

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

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.

It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.

Nothing endears so much a friend as sorrow for his death. The pleasure of his company has not so powerful an influence.

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.

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.

Truth springs from argument amongst friends.

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

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.

Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them.

Everything in the world is purchased by labor.

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

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

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.

A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.