Scotland, 1711–1776
David Hume
Scottish empiricist whose calm skepticism dismantled easy assumptions about causation, the self, and the foundations of belief.
David Hume in 23 lines
Every David Hume passage in thinkr's library, with the theme each one speaks to.
“Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.”
“Truth springs from argument amongst friends.”
“A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”
“The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.”
“As to the Approbation or Esteem of those Blockheads who call themselves the Public, & whom a Bookseller, a Lord, a Priest, or a Party can guide, I do most heartily despise it.”
“Here am I who have written on all sorts of subjects calculated to excite hostility, moral, political, and religious, and yet I have no enemies — except, indeed, all the Whigs, all the Tories, and all the Christians.”
“Nature may certainly produce whatever can arise from habit: Nay, habit is nothing but one of the principles of nature, and derives all its force from that origin.”
“Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.”
“Grief and disappointment give rise to anger, anger to envy, envy to malice, and malice to grief again, till the whole circle be completed.”
“Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.”
“The sense of justice and injustice is not deriv'd from nature, but arises artificially... from education, and human conventions.”
“'Tis only from the selfishness and confin'd generosity of men, along with the scanty provision nature has made for his wants, that justice derives its origin.”
“This avidity alone, of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends, is insatiable, perpetual, universal, and directly destructive of society.”
“That the sun will not rise to-morrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise.”
“I say, then, that 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”
“In vain, therefore, should we pretend to determine any single event, or infer any cause or effect, without the assistance of observation and experience.”
“What would become of history, had we not a dependence on the veracity of the historian, according to the experience, what we have had of mankind?”
“By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will.”
“Hypothetical liberty is allowed to everyone who is not a prisoner and in chains”
“Though experience be our only guide in reasoning concerning matters of fact; it must be acknowledged, that this guide is not altogether infallible, but in some cases is apt to lead us into errors.”
“He is happy, whose circumstances suit his temper; but he is more excellent, who can suit his temper to any circumstances.”
“From the comparison of theism and idolatry, we may form some other observations, which will also confirm the vulgar observation that the corruption of the best things gives rise to the worst.”
“During such calm sunshine of the mind, these spectres of false divinity never make their appearance.”
Where David Hume lands on a hard choice
Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what a position does when it meets a situation where every option costs something.
A friend asks if they made the right choice. They didn't.
You are resisting the urge to force the moment. The danger is mistaking avoidance for patience.
You notice a loophole that benefits you and hurts no one visibly.
You are suspicious of moral theater and alert to how systems really work. The risk is becoming clever at the expense of character.
A group accepts you only when you hide a real part of yourself.
You are noticing that identity lives inside conditions, not outside them. The risk is forgetting where the mask ends.
Your workplace rewards a version of you that feels false.
You are acknowledging that institutions run on roles and incentives. The danger is becoming unable to find your own face afterward.
Everyone in the room is avoiding the obvious problem.
You are trusting experience to reveal what argument cannot. The danger is allowing preventable harm for the sake of being proven right.
The evidence is discouraging, but hope keeps returning.
You are asking belief to answer to the world. The risk is letting evidence become a costume for fear.
Someone who shaped you turns out to have done real harm.
You are judging the idea on its own evidence rather than its origin. The risk is a convenient rule you apply only to teachers you loved.
You can be widely liked or clearly respected, not both here.
You are treating relationships as the medium the work travels through. The risk is a reputation for agreement that outlives your usefulness.
A belief you hold arrived from your parents, unexamined.
You are letting the belief prove itself in use rather than in argument. The danger is a permanent provisionality that never commits.
You have been alone long enough that you cannot tell which it is.
You are treating the feeling as information about a missing thing, not a flaw. The risk is using noise to avoid the diagnosis.
You are the only person who seems to see the problem.
You are converting conviction into something others can check. The cost is time the problem may not give you.
The good you did is only useful to others if they hear about it.
You are separating the doing from the telling without losing the effect. The danger is engineering the conditions for being praised.
A rule you must follow is unjust, and breaking it costs almost nothing.
You are refusing to lend the rule your compliance without paying for a fight. The cost is a private exception you would not grant others.
The expert's advice contradicts what your own eyes tell you.
You are recognising that knowledge is mostly borrowed and usually well-borrowed. The risk is deference that survives the evidence against it.
A stranger needs help and you have somewhere to be.
You are admitting the size of what you actually give rather than inflating it. The danger is that honesty about limits slowly widens them.
A past version of your life keeps looking better than this one.
You are testing the comparison before letting it judge the present. The cost is dismantling a comfort that was doing real work.
People consistently expect less of you than you are.
You are treating the mistake as an advantage rather than an insult. The cost is colluding in a picture of yourself you resent.
You cannot tell if you are finding yourself or inventing one.
You are declining a question that may not have a referent. The danger is using a clever answer to avoid choosing anything.
You spend real effort on how you look and feel foolish about it.
You are accepting that presentation is part of how people meet each other. The cost is a standard that gets more expensive with age.
You are paid more than someone who does more than you.
You are declining responsibility for a mechanism you did not build. The cost is a reasoning that will excuse anything it produces.
Lessons that quote David Hume
- Hume & Experience — Where ideas really come from
- Hume, Kant, and Gettier — Induction, synthesis, and a famous puzzle
Reading David Hume today
David Hume wrote in 1711–1776, from Scotland — a world with different assumptions about authority, death and what a life is for. That distance is useful rather than a problem: it is what lets the ideas cut against assumptions you did not know you were making.
In thinkr, David Hume is one of 44 thinkers you can put a real question to, and the answers come back in that thinker's own voice and commitments rather than as a neutral summary. The 23 passages above are what the app draws on.
Working at roughly the same time
- Arthur Schopenhauer — Germany, 1788–1860
- Baruch Spinoza — Netherlands, 1632–1677
- Friedrich Nietzsche — Germany, 1844–1900
- Henry David Thoreau — USA, 1817–1862
- Immanuel Kant — Prussia, 1724–1804
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau — Switzerland/France, 1712–1778
Argues the same cases
Immanuel Kant, Socrates, Aristotle, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Thomas Hobbes take positions on the same dilemmas as David Hume, which is usually where the disagreements become concrete.