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
.. that which renders morality an active principle and constitutes virtue our happiness, and vice our misery: it is probable, I say, that this final sentence depends on some internal sense or feeling, which nature has made universal in the whole species.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that morality and happiness are intertwined, and that our understanding of virtue and vice is linked to an innate human sense.
David Hume emphasizes the connection between morality and human happiness, positing that our perceptions of virtue and vice stem from a universal internal sense that all humans share. He asserts that this moral compass, inherent in our nature, drives us to seek happiness through virtue, while steering us away from vice, which leads to misery.
Themes
MoralityHappinessVirtueViceHuman Nature
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared during a philosophical discussion on the nature of morality.
More from David Hume
All quotes →Eloquence, 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.
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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.
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The great end of all human industry is the attainment of happiness
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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.
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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.
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