David Hume Quotes

The truth is in nature, and I shall prove it.

Science is like a love affair with nature; an elusive, tantalising mistress. It has all the turbulence, twists and turns of romantic love, but that's part of the game.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

It must be for truth's sake, and not for the sake of its usefulness to humanity, that the scientific man studies Nature.

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one's gaze.

Nature loves to hide.

I truly believe the book of philosophy to be that which stands perpetually open before our eyes, though since it is written in characters different from those of our alphabet it cannot be read by everyone.

Never does nature say one thing and Wisdom another. Variant: Wisdom and Nature! are they not the same? Variant: Nature and Wisdon always speak alike.

All life is a movement in relationship. There is no living thing on earth which is not related to something or other.

The absolute good is not a matter of opinion but of nature.

Our imagination is struck only by what is great; but the lover of natural philosophy should reflect equally on little things.

One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity.

Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves.

The philosopher is Nature's pilot.

The naturalists have been engaged in thinking about Nature. They have not attended to the fact that they were thinking. The moment one attends to this it is obvious that one's own thinking cannot be merely a natural event, and that therefore something other than nature exists. The Supernatural is not remote or abstruse; it is a matter of daily and hourly experience, as intimate as breathing.

Science...has become identified with a philosophy known as materialism or scientific naturalism. This philosophy insists that nature is all there is, or at least the only thing about which we can have any knowledge. It follows that nature had to do its own creating, and that the means of creation must have included any role for God.

Natura nihil agit frustra [Nature does nothing in vain] is the only indisputible axiom in philosophy. There are no grotesques in nature; not any thing framed to fill up empty cantons, and unncecessary spaces.

Ultimate questions will always lie beyond the scope of empirical science as it is.

There is a mask of theory over the whole face of nature.

Nothing may truly be said to be a miracle except in the profound sense that everything is a miracle.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn't it just lie there and rot?

Theology is not what we know about God, but what we do not know about Nature.

Temperament is fixed, set. The skull, followed by the temperament: the two hardest parts of the body. Follow your temperament. It is not a philosophy, It is a rule, like the Rule of St Benedict.

Think not disdainfully of death, but look on it with favor; for even death is one of the things that Nature wills.

The mysteries of Nature and of humanity are not lessened, but increased, by the discoveries of philosophic skill.