David Hume

And Addison, perhaps, will be read with pleasure, when Locke shall be entirely forgotten.

Disputes are multiplied, as if everything was uncertain; and these disputes are managed with the greatest warmth, as if everything was certain.

Indulge your passion for science, says she, but let your science be human, and such as may have a direct reference to action and society.

We can form the idea of a golden mountain, and from thence conclude that such a mountain may actually exist. We can form no idea of a mountain without a valley, and therefore regard it as impossible.

Obscurity, indeed, is painful to the mind as well as to the eye; but to bring light from obscurity, by whatever labour, must needs be delightful and rejoicing.

Thus all probable reasoning is nothing but a species of sensation.

A blind man can form no notion of colours; a deaf man of sounds.

Each new experiment is as a new stroke of the pencil, which bestows an additional vivacity on the colours without either multiplying or enlarging the figure.

Adam, though his rational faculties be supposed, at the very first, entirely perfect, could not have inferred from the fluidity and transparency of water that it would suffocate him, or from the light and warmth of fire that it would consume him.

I can only reply to all these arguments, that the case is here much the same, as if a blind man should pretend to find a great many absurdities in the supposition, that the colour of scarlet is not the same with the sound of a trumpet, nor light the same with solidity.

The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer: as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it.

The mind, as well as the body, seems to be endowed with a certain precise degree of force and activity, which it never employs in one action, but at the expense of all the rest.

Nothing so like as eggs; yet no one, on account of this appearing similarity, expects the same taste and relish in all of them.

For can anyone conceive a passion of a yard in length, a foot in breadth, and an inch in thickness?

Every passion is mortified by it, except the love of truth; and that passion never is, nor can be, carried to too high a degree.

I am first affrighted and confounded with that forlorn solitude, in which I am placed in my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expelled all human commerce, and left utterly abandoned and disconsolate.

We can, in our conception, join the head of a man to the body of a horse; but it is not in our power to believe that such an animal has ever really existed.

If we believe, that fire warms, or water refreshes, it is only because it costs us too much pains to think otherwise.

Thus, according to these philosophers, everything is full of God.

Men always consider the sentiments of others in their judgment of themselves.