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Home  »  Dictionary of Quotations  »  Hume

James Wood, comp. Dictionary of Quotations. 1899.

Hume

A propensity to hope and joy is real riches; one to fear and sorrow, real poverty.

A state is never greater than when all its superfluous hands are employed in the service of the public.

All advantages are attended with disadvantages.

All power, even the most despotic, rests ultimately on opinion.

Art may make a suit of clothes, but Nature must produce a man.

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

Character is the result of a system of stereotyped principles.

Delicacy of taste has the same effect as delicacy of passion; it enlarges the sphere both of our happiness and misery, and makes us sensible to pain as well as pleasures, which escape the rest of mankind.

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

Everything is sold to skill and labour.

Everything useful to the life of man arises from the ground, but few things arise in that condition which is requisite to render them useful.

Examine the religious principles which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded that they are anything but sick men’s dreams.

Great pleasures are much less frequent than great pains.

Human life is more governed by fortune than by reason.

Jealousy is a painful passion; yet without some share of it, the agreeable affection of love has difficulty to subsist in its full force and violence.

Liberty of thinking and expressing our thoughts is always fatal to priestly power, and to those pious frauds on which it is commonly founded.

Look out for a people entirely destitute of religion. If you find them at all, be assured that they are but few degrees removed from brutes.

No theological absurdities so glaring that they have not sometimes been embraced by men of the greatest and most cultivated understanding. No religious precepts so rigorous that they have not been adopted by the most voluptuous and most abandoned of men.

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

Nothing is more free than the imagination of man.

Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.

Propensity to hope and joy is real riches; one to fear and sorrow, real poverty.

The ages of greatest public spirit are not always eminent for private virtue.

The law always limits every power which it bestows.

The more men refine upon pleasure, the less will they indulge in excesses of any kind.

Time, when well husbanded, is like a cultivated field, of which a few acres produce more of what is useful to life, than extensive provinces, even of the richest soil, when overrun with weeds and brambles.

When the affections are moved there is no place for the imagination.

While we are reasoning concerning life, life is gone.