The Great Guide Quotes

“If refined sense and exalted sense be not so useful as common sense, their rarity, their novelty, and the nobleness of their objects make some compensation, and render them the admiration of mankind: As gold, though less serviceable than iron, acquires, from its scarcity, a value, which is much superior.”
― Julian Baggini, The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well

“His “bundle” theory of the self makes it almost inevitable that the mass of desires, beliefs, thoughts, and memories that make up a person is going to lack anything close to perfect coherence.”
― Julian Baggini, The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well

“Do not ask yourself whether you are brave or cowardly, generous or selfish, calm or volatile, but to what extent and in what ways you exhibit all of these traits.”
― Julian Baggini, The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well

“This David Hume is an excellent man; he is naturally placid; he listens attentively, he sometimes speaks with wit, although he speaks little; but he is clumsy, he has neither warmth, nor grace, nor charm of humour, nor anything that properly appertains to the chirping of those charming little mechanisms known as pretty women.”23”
― Julian Baggini, The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well

“order for this pragmatic form of justice to work it has to be transparent, consistent, and predictable. “Justice, in her decisions, never regards the fitness or unfitness of objects to particular persons, but conducts herself by more extensive views.”
― Julian Baggini, The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well

“attempt do not go on to die by suicide. Most suicide attempts are impulsive: a study in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that “24% took less than 5 minutes between the decision to kill themselves and the actual attempt, and 70% took less than 1 hour.”
― Julian Baggini, The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well

“not what they already know divides them.”
― Julian Baggini, The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well

“when people strongly disagree, try to find what they haven’t noticed unites them,”
― Julian Baggini, The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well

“All doctrines are to be suspected, which are favoured by our passions.”
― Julian Baggini, The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well

“we use reason more than we are governed by it.”
― Julian Baggini, The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well

“Yet another great psychological insight is that although we like to think we are reasonable people who base our conclusions on sound arguments, a lot of the time we simply use our intellects to rationalize what we already believe.”
― Julian Baggini, The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well

“imagination, not reason, reigns sovereign in the human mind and it can only be overthrown by great effort.”
― Julian Baggini, The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well

“A related cognitive bias is hyperbolic discounting, the tendency to prefer immediate rewards over future ones, even when the future rewards are much greater.”
― Julian Baggini, The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well

“For instance, he remarks that “an experiment, that is recent and fresh in the memory, affects us more than one that is in some measure obliterated; and has a superior influence on the judgment, as well as on the passions.”
― Julian Baggini, The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well

“To put it another way, we say the self has experiences but the self is actually just an ordered collection of experiences.”
― Julian Baggini, The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well

“When moderation becomes a habit, it can be hard to see the exceptions, when moderation becomes a vice rather than a virtue. It”
― Julian Baggini, The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well

“But Hume argued this is simply because the determinants of human behavior are more complicated and therefore less predictable than many other aspects of nature. That does not mean they are less determined by prior causes. Unexpected behaviors are not uncaused; their causes are simply less obvious. If we understood the full circumstances better we would easily see why they occurred.”
― Julian Baggini, The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well

“This is largely because we do not appear to behave with the same predictable regularity as plants and animals.”
― Julian Baggini, The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well

“Far from being a tabula rasa, the mind comes equipped at the very least with an instinct to perceive causation.”
― Julian Baggini, The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well

“Seeing clearly is the precondition for thinking and understanding clearly:”
― Julian Baggini, The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well

“Accepting Hume’s conclusions about the limits of logical reasoning requires us to give up the hope that reason alone can stand as the foundation of knowledge.”
― Julian Baggini, The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well

“Ethics concerns how agreeable or useful our actions are to ourselves and others,”
― Julian Baggini, The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well

“so people become more civil by practicing small daily acts of politeness, which although mere “trifles” allow “an easy Transition to something more material.”
― Julian Baggini, The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well

“Wilful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice.” His wager is that “you never can find it, till you turn your reflection into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, towards this action. Here is a matter of fact; but ’tis the object of feeling, not of reason. It lies in yourself, not in the object.”
― Julian Baggini, The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well