Your corn is ripe today; mine will be so tomorrow. 'Tis profitable for us both, that I should labour with you today, and that you should aid me tomorrow.
David HumeRead
All this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us the by senses and experience.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The mind's creativity is derived from manipulating sensory experiences rather than creating something entirely new.
David Hume's quote emphasizes that the mind's creative abilities are not originated from a vacuum but are instead based on the raw materials provided by our senses and past experiences. This perspective suggests that all innovations and artistic expressions are simply new combinations or alterations of existing ideas and perceptions, rather than entirely original constructs.
Themes
CreativityMindExperienceSensesPhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture about the nature of creativity in art and science.
More from David Hume
All quotes βEloquence, at its highest pitch, leaves little room for reason or reflection, but addresses itself entirely to the desires and affections, captivating the willing hearers, and subduing their understanding.
David HumeRead
All that belongs to human understanding, in this deep ignorance and obscurity, is to be sceptical, or at least cautious, and not to admit of any hypothesis whatever, much less of any which is supported by no appearance of probability.
David HumeRead
The great end of all human industry is the attainment of happiness
David HumeRead
There is a very remarkable inclination in human nature to bestow on external objects the same emotions which it observes in itself, and to find every where those ideas which are most present to it.
David HumeRead
To have recourse to the veracity of the supreme Being, in order to prove the veracity of our senses, is surely making a very unexpected circuit.
David HumeRead
Similar quotes
I'm worried that the audience is being conditioned. That's my real fear. Because if they don't want to see wrinkles on the screen, if they actually fear looking at them, then it's only going to get worse. Those of us who don't want to shoot up and cut and sew, we're just not going be cast.
Robin WrightRead
You have to start out learning to believe the little lies. "So we can believe the big ones?" Yes. Justice, mercy, duty. That sort of thing.
Terry PratchettRead
As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.
Boris PasternakRead
Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree.
Ralph Waldo EmersonRead
Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians-- with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds-- project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one.
Bruce ChatwinRead
What difference is there in the color of the soul?
Solomon NorthupRead