David Hume Quotes About Nature

Quotes about: Nature

• Art may make a suite of clothes, but nature must produce a man.

  David Hume

  Art, Nature, Men

  1741-2 Essays Moral, Political and Literary,'The Epicurean'.

• Look round this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organized, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind Nature, inpregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children.

  David Hume

  Nature, Children, Science

  David Hume (1874). “A Treatise on Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning Into Moral Subjects; and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion”, p.452

• To consider the matter aright, reason is nothing but a wonderful and unintelligible instinct in our souls, which carries us along a certain train of ideas, and endows them with particular qualities, according to their particular situations and relations. This instinct, 'tis true, arises from past observation and experience; but can anyone give the ultimate reason, why past experience and observation produces such an effect, any more than why nature alone should produce it?

  David Hume

  Nature, Science, Past

  David Hume (2003). “A Treatise of Human Nature”, p.128, Courier Corporation

• It is a great mortification to the vanity of man, that his utmost art and industry can never equal the meanest of nature's productions, either for beauty or value. Art is only the under-workman, and is employed to give a few strokes of embellishment to those pieces, which come from the hand of the master.

  David Hume

  Art, Nature, Men

  David Hume (1825). “Essays and treatises on several subjects: essays, moral, political and literary”, p.131

• While Newton seemed to draw off the veil from some of the mysteries of nature, he showed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy; and thereby restored her ultimate secrets to that obscurity, in which they ever did and ever will remain.

  David Hume

  Nature, Philosophy, Science

  David Hume (1759). “The Commonwealth, and the reigns of Charles II. and James II”, p.450

• [A person’s] utmost art and industry can never equal the meanest of nature's productions, either for beauty or value.

  David Hume

  Art, Nature, Mortification

  David Hume (1875). “Essays Moral, Political, and Literary”, p.197

• Of all the animals with which this globe is peopled, there is none towards whom nature seems, at first sight, to have exercised more cruelty than towards man, in the numberless wants and necessities with which she has loaded him, and in the slender means which she affords to the relieving these necessities.

  David Hume

  Nature, Mean, Animal

  A Treatise upon Human Nature bk. 3 (1739)

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin