Date: 1748, 1777

"The passion for philosophy, like that for religion, seems liable to this inconvenience, that, though it aims at the correction of our manners, and extirpation of our vices, it may only serve, by imprudent management, to foster a predominant inclination, and push the mind, with more determined re...

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1748, 1777

"Nothing is more free than the imagination of man; and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas, furnished by the internal and external senses, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1748, 1777

"It [the imagination] can feign a train of events, with all the appearance of reality, ascribe to them a particular time and place, conceive them as existent, and paint them out to itself with every circumstance, that belongs to any historical fact, which it believes with the greatest certainty."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1748, 1777

"This impression of my senses immediately conveys my thought to the person, together with all the surrounding objects. I paint them out to myself as existing at present, with the same qualities and relations, of which I formerly knew them possessed."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1748, 1777

"Our mental vision or conception of ideas is nothing but a revelation made to us by our Maker."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1748, 1777

"Inference and reasoning concerning the operations of nature would, from that moment, be at an end; and the memory and senses remain the only canals, by which the knowledge of any real existence could possibly have access to the mind."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1748, 1777

"They know, that a human body is a mighty complicated machine: That many secret powers lurk in it, which are altogether beyond our comprehension: That to us it must often appear very uncertain in its operations: And that therefore the irregular events, which outwardly discover themselves, can be ...

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1748

"There is nothing more certain, that that there are two Kinds of Conviction, one flowing from a sudden and violent breaking-in of Truth, when the Understanding is as it were taken by Storm, and a Man's whole System of Thinking is changed in an Instant: the other a gradual, gentle, and slow steali...

— Anonymous; [Lyttleton]

Date: 1748

"Our LORD uses both Methods at once, in order to fit his Disciples for their Duty, to open their Eyes, to extend their Views, to extirpate Prejudices, to make every Man's Mind a rasa Tabula, or as his own Phrase is, to make plain the Ways of the LORD."

— Anonymous; [Lyttleton]

Date: 1780?

"Lust is the unbridled Horse of the Soul that has thrown its Rider."

— Walpole, Horatio [Horace], fourth earl of Orford (1717-1797)