David Hume Quotes: Sources, Meanings & Themes
Browse quotations by David Hume with named works, context notes, meanings and recurring themes.
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“Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions,”
Meaning & context
Hume argues that reasoning can inform means and consequences but does not by itself supply the motivating ends that move a person to act.
Source details
A Treatise of Human Nature, Book II, Part III, Section III, “Of the Influencing Motives of the Will,” Project Gutenberg #4705. The frozen catalog retains the opening clause “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions,” from a longer sentence. It remains Hume’s historical philosophical thesis rather than contemporary empirical psychology.
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“A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.”
Meaning & context
Hume argues that confidence should rise or fall with the strength and consistency of the available evidence rather than remain fixed regardless of what experience supports.
Source details
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, ‘Of Miracles,’ Part I, paragraph 87 in the represented Selby-Bigge text, Project Gutenberg #9662. ‘A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence’ follows Hume's discussion of varying degrees of assurance from experience. It is eighteenth-century epistemological argument and preserves the connective ‘therefore’; it is not a complete modern statistical or scientific decision rule.
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“Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”
Meaning & context
Hume begins from the variability of aesthetic response, locating experienced beauty in the relation between an object and the perceiving mind.
Source details
“Of the Standard of Taste,” first published in 1757 and represented by Fordham’s Modern History Sourcebook transcription. Hume subsequently qualifies this apparent subjectivism by discussing practiced judgment and durable critical standards, so the sentence is not the whole essay’s conclusion.