David Hume Quotes on Knowledge
Hume's Treatise of Human Nature and Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding develop the most rigorous early modern empiricism: every idea derives from a prior impression, and any concept that cannot be traced to such an impression is suspect. The famous results follow: causation is not a perceived necessary connection but a habit of the mind formed by constant conjunction; induction has no rational justification beyond custom; the self is not a substance but a bundle of perceptions in continual flux. The skeptical results were Hume's primary philosophical achievement, though he insisted that ordinary life proceeds untouched by them.
Quotes
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“A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”
Section X: Of Miracles; Part I. 87 -
“Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.”
Part 4, Section 7 -
“All knowledge degenerates into probability.”
Part 4, Section 1 -
“When men are most sure and arrogant they are commonly most mistaken.”
§ 9.13 : Conclusion, Pt. 1 -
“Here then we may learn the fallacy of the remark... that any particular state is weak, though fertile, populous, and well cultivated, merely because it wants money . It appears that the want of money can never injure any state within itself: For men and commodities are the real strength of any community. It is the simple manner of living which here hurts the public, by confining the gold and silve”
Of Money (1752) as quoted in David Hume: Writings on Economics (1955, 1970) ed., Eugene Rotwein, p. 45. -
“A wise man's kingdom is his own breast: or, if he ever looks farther, it will only be to the judgment of a select few, who are free from prejudices , and capable of examining his work . Nothing indeed can be a stronger presumption of falsehood than the approbation of the multitude; and Phocion, you know, always suspected himself of some blunder when he was attended with the applauses of the populace.”
Playfully ironic letter to Adam Smith regarding the positive reception of "The Theory of Moral Sentiments -
“Does a man of sense run after every silly tale of hobgoblins or fairies , and canvass particularly the evidence ? I never knew anyone, that examined and deliberated about nonsense who did not believe it before the end of his enquiries.”
Letters -
“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.”
Letter 138, To Gilbert Elliot of Minto; August 9, 1757 -
“Letter 138, To Gilbert Elliot of Minto; August 9, 1757”
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. -
“The conclusion [of the essay 'Of the Protestant Succession'] shows me a Whig, but a very sceptical one.”
Letter to Henry Home (9 February 1748), quoted in J. Y. T. Greig, The Letters of David Hume: Volume I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), p. 111