Hume Quotes

“[T]he minds of men are mirrors to one another’ (T 365), Hume remarked, and just as mirrors are not in control of the reflections they give, so also our feelings, and beliefs, cannot help but be impinged upon by the feelings and beliefs of those around us.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: A Very Short Introduction

“The societies that human beings live in are so large and complex that peace and order require the invention of moral codes, and of government and political power too.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: A Very Short Introduction

“And in the process it goes some way towards explaining why highly stratified societies are not pulled apart by tensions arising from inequalities of wealth and social standing. Of course there is bound to be resentment and envy on the part of the poor and powerless when they compare their lives with the lives of their superiors. But, Hume suggested, this resentment usually produces not a desire to overturn the social order, but, instead, a desire on the part of the lower orders to improve their situation relative to those around them. For we care much more about how we stand in our relations with our peers than about the distance between us and the rich and famous.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: A Very Short Introduction

“Sympathy combines with our interest in property to generate a form of love or esteem which Hume took to be particularly prevalent in human nature. This is the admiration we feel for the rich and powerful.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: A Very Short Introduction

“Pride, shame, love, and hatred are classified by Hume as ‘indirect’ passions. They are different in kind from simple and immediate responses to present or future good and evil, like joy and sorrow, or hope and fear. Their indirectness lies in the fact that they are complex mental phenomena which arise from ideas of ourselves in our relations with a wide variety of causes of pleasure and pain.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: A Very Short Introduction

“Hume was especially interested in how the relation of ownership, or property, insinuates itself into our emotional lives to the point where it is the principal cause of these ‘indirect’ passions.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: A Very Short Introduction

“Sympathy—not here a form of compassion, but rather a kind of attunement to the states of mind of other people—is absolutely central to the world of the passions as Hume describes it. It gives us the vivid, sometimes pleasurable, sometimes painful, sense we always have of ourselves as standing in relation with other people.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: A Very Short Introduction

“It mattered then, that, having removed a controlling faculty of reason from human nature, Hume had an account to give of how the violent passions are tamed and suppressed.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: A Very Short Introduction

“Worries about the reliability of the understanding arose only when Hume realized that, properly speaking, we have no idea at all what we are talking about when we call one thing the cause of another. We come to believe that one thing is the cause of another when the two things in question have presented themselves in our experience in a particular way.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: A Very Short Introduction

“It was not reason but rather custom that was, Hume claimed, ‘the guide of life’ (T 652).”
― James A. Harris, Hume: A Very Short Introduction