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Quotes from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding — David Hume

1711–1776 Scotland

← All quotes by David Hume

32 quotes

Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

Nature will always maintain her rights, and prevail in the end over any abstract reasoning whatsoever.

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

We may change the name of things; but their nature and their operation on the understanding never change.

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

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.

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

No conclusions can be more agreeable to scepticism than such as make discoveries concerning the weakness and narrow limits of human reason and capacity.

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

Morals and criticism are not so properly objects of the understanding as of taste and sentiment.

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

If we reason a priori, anything may appear able to produce anything.

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will.

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

In vain, therefore, should we pretend to determine any single event, or infer any cause or effect, without the assistance of observation and experience.

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

Custom, then, is the great guide of human life.

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

Eloquence, when at its highest pitch, leaves little room for reason or reflection; but addressing itself entirely to the fancy or the affections, captivates the willing hearers, and subdues their understanding.

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

THERE is no method of reasoning more common, and yet none more blameable, than, in philosophical disputes, to endeavour the refutation of any hypothesis, by a pretence of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality.

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

There is a degree of doubt, and caution, and modesty, which, in all kinds of scrutiny and decision, ought for ever to accompany a just reasoner.

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

All inferences from experience... are effects of custom, not of reasoning.

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

The chief obstacle... to our improvement in the moral and metaphysical sciences is the obscurity of the ideas, and ambiguity of the terms.

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

Hypothetical liberty is allowed to everyone who is not a prisoner and in chains

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

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?

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

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.

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

Nature must have provided some other principle, of more ready, and more general use and application; nor can an operation of such immense consequence in life, as that of inferring effects from causes, be trusted to the uncertain process of reasoning and argumentation.

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: David Hume (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.