In every page of David Hume, there is more to be learned than from Hegel’s, Herbart’s and Schleiermacher’s complete philosophical works.
Money is human happiness in the abstract.
To forgive and forget means to throw away dearly bought experience.
If you feel irritated by the absurd remarks of two people whose conversation you happen to overhear, you should imagine that you are listening to a dialogue of two fools in a comedy.
Intellect is a magnitude of intensity, not a magnitude of extensity.
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. This is an error of the intellect as inevitable as that error of the eye which lets you fancy that on the horizon heaven and earth meet.
Any book, which is at all important, should be reread immediately.
You can do what you will, but in any given moment of your life you can will only one definite thing and absolutely nothing other than that one thing.
The world is my representation.
The principle of contradiction establishes merely the agreement of concepts, but does not itself produce concepts.
Whether we are in a pleasant or a painful state depends, finally, upon the kind of matter that pervades and engrosses our consciousness and what we compare it to – better and we envious and sad, worse and we feel grateful and happy.
We seldom think of what we have but always of what we lack. Therefore, rather than grateful, we are bitter.
Every satisfaction he attains lays the seeds of some new desire, so that there is no end to the wishes of each individual will.
To gain anything we have longed for is only to discover how vain and empty it is; and even though we are always living in expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again.
It is not what things are objectively and in themselves, but what they are for us, in our way of looking at them, that makes us happy or the reverse.
When you look back on your life, it looks as though it were a plot, but when you are into it, it’s a mess: just one surprise after another. Then, later, you see it was perfect.
Something of great importance now past is inferior to something of little importance now present, in that the latter is a reality, and related to the former as something to nothing.
Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes.
When a man has reached a condition in which he believes that a thing must happen because he does not wish it, and that what he wishes to happen never will be, this is really the state called desperation.
The progress of life shows a man the stuff of which he is made.