David Hume Quotes

My father, whose way was to force every event in nature into an hypothesis, by which means never man crucified TRUTH at the rate he did.

Except in pure mathematics, nothing is known for certain (although much is certainly false).

Science is not wisdom.

Science is a philosophy of discovery; intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance... Something fundamamental is going on in people's minds when they confront things they don't understnd.

Now this principle of induction cannot be a purely logical truth like a tautology or an analytic statement. . . .

It is impossible for someone to dispel his fears about the most important matters if he doesn't know the nature of the universe but still gives some credence to myths. So without the study of nature there is no enjoyment of pure pleasure.

God forbid that Truth should be confined to Mathematical Demonstration!

Through logic and inference we can prove anything. Therefore, logic and inference, in contrast to ordinary daily living experience, are secondary instruments of knowledge. Probably tertiary.

Count Hermann Keyserling once said truly that the greatest American superstition was the belief in facts.

To argue that the gaps in knowledge which confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.

Educated guesswork' is what science is. You form hypotheses, test them against the evidence, and if they fit the evidence, you can assume you've got close to the truth.

Let not men think there is no truth, but in the sciences that they study, or the books that they read.

I don't believe anything till I have seen the proof. For anything without proof, I think we should believe the theory that gives us peace. It doesn't matter whether the theory is true or not.

I would proclaim that the vast majority of what [say, Scientific American] is true-yet my ability to defend such a claim is weaker than I would like. And most likely the readers, authors, and editors of that magazine would be equally hard pressed to come up with cogent, non-technical arguments convincing a skeptic of this point, especially if pitted against a clever lawyer arguing the contrary. How come Truth is such a slippery beast?

There's another way to phrase that and that is that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. It is basically saying the same thing in a different way. Simply because you do not have evidence that something does exist does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn't exist.

The typical person has no trouble believing without knowing. What people need to realize is simply that you do not need to believe to know.

Feelings are not everything! There is very little absolute truth in life.

Physics is a good framework for thinking. ... Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there.

If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that proves they should value evidence. If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic?

I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether the things are so.

Maybe scientists are fundamentalist when it comes to defining in some abstract way what is meant by 'truth'. But so is everybody else. I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere. We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it.

Belief has no place as far as science reaches, and may be first permitted to take root where science stops.

Until the seventeenth century there was no concept of evidence with which to pose the problem of induction!