David Hume Quotes

"Taste is not only a part and index of morality, it is the only morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is "What do you like?" Tell me what you like, I'll tell you what you are."

To be moral involves taking a position towards that matrix, thinking critically about what is taken for granted.

Literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade.

Philosophy rests on a proposition that whatever is is right. Preaching begins by assuming that whatever is is wrong.

The rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reason.

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

I would like us to think about it more explicitly, and not take our intuitions as the given of ethics, but rather to reflect on it, and be more open about the fact that something is an ethical issues and think what we ought to do about it.

Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.

I have a morality. I don't know if it's the best morality. And I do like thinking. If people perceive that as a moral intellectualism, that's fine. That's up to them to decide.

The art of music is good, for the reason, among others, that it produces pleasure; but what proof is it possible to give that pleasure is good? If, then, it is asserted that there is a comprehensive formula, including all things which are in themselves good, and that whatever else is good, is not so as an end, but as a mean, the formula may be accepted or rejected, but is not a subject of what is commonly understood by proof.

The pleasure of criticizing takes away from us the pleasure of being moved by some very fine things.

An ethicist is somebody who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind.

Morality is truth in full bloom.

It is the heart that makes the critic, not the nose.

When your principles seem to be demanding suicide, clearly it's time to check your premises

Abstractions about right and wrong, whether they are as old as Thou Shalt Not Kill or as modern as Do Your Own Thing, often serve only to confuse and weaken genuine moral decision.

You can't slice up morals.

I doubt not, but from self-evident Propositions, by necessary Consequences, as incontestable as those in Mathematics, the measures of right and wrong might be made out.

Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience.

I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

The act of willing this or that, of choosing among various courses of conduct, is central in the realm of ethics.

You know, I'm really not interested in someone telling me that something's good or bad.

We are now facing a problem more of ethics than of physics.

I do my research, and if I'm supporting something, then it's because it aligns with me morally and ethically.