David Hume Quotes About Universe

Quotes about: Universe

• The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.

  David Hume

  Life, Science, Men

  David Hume, Richard H. Popkin (1998). “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Second Edition)”, p.100, Hackett Publishing

• 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

• There surely is a being who presides over the universe; and who, with infinite wisdom and power, has reduced the jarring elementsinto just order and proportion. Let speculative reasoners dispute, how far this beneficent being extends his care, and whether he prolongs our existence beyond the grave, in order to bestow on virtue its just reward, and render it fully triumphant.

  David Hume

  God, Order, Rewards

  David Hume, Stephen Copley, Andrew Edgar (2008). “Selected Essays”, p.91, Oxford University Press

• Nothing exists without a cause, the original cause of this universe we call God.

  David Hume

  Causes, Originals, Universe

• The religious hypothesis, therefore, must be considered only as a particular method of accounting for the visible phenomena of the universe: but no just reasoner will ever presume to infer from it any single fact, and alter or add to the phenomena, in any single particular.

  David Hume

  Religious, Atheism, Add

  David Hume (1758). “Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects”, p.360

• When I shall be dead, the principles of which I am composed will still perform their part in the universe, and will be equally useful in the grand fabric, as when they composed this individual creature. The difference to the whole will be no greater betwixt my being in a chamber and in the open air. The one change is of more importance to me than the other; but not more so to the universe.

  David Hume

  Air, Differences, Principles

  David Hume (1875). “Essays Moral, Political, and Literary”, p.412

• What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call thought, that we must thus make it the model of the whole universe? Our partiality in our own favour does indeed present it on all occasions; but sound philosophy ought carefully to guard against so natural an illusion.

  David Hume

  Philosophy, Brain, Sound

  David Hume (1824). “The Philosophical Works of David Hume ... Containing Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Essays on the Immortality of the Soul, Suicide ... &c. A New Edition”, p.24

• Let us fix our attention out of ourselves as much as possible; let us chase our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of existence, but those perceptions, which have appeared in that narrow compass.

  David Hume

  Imagination, Heaven, Perception

  1739 A Treatise of Human Nature, bk.1, pt.2, section 6.

• The whole of natural theologyresolves itself into one simple, though somewhat ambiguous proposition, That the cause or causesof order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence.

  David Hume

  Simple, Order, Religion

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