A Quote by David Hume

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.

David Hume

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Only Ought Passions Reason Slave

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David Hume
Scottish - Philosopher
May 7, 1711 - August 25, 1776

Most humans know their own "reason" only in the sense that Hume defined it, as "a slave to the passions"-and by "passions" he meant not moral passions or the passions of transcendent genius, but only low appetites or base desires, which society and economy ultimately shape and spur on in us.

Kenny Smith

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

David Hume

The passions, therefore, not the reason, of the public would sit in judgment. But it is the reason, alone, of the public, that ought to control and regulate the government. The passions ought to be controlled and regulated by the government.

James Madison

The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.

Cyril Connolly

The reason is, and by rights ought to be, slave to the emotions.

Bertrand Russell

It was not reason that besieged Troy; it was not reason that sent forth the Saracen from the desert to conquer the world; that inspired the crusades; that instituted the monastic orders; it was not reason that produced the Jesuits; above all, it was not reason that created the French Revolution. Man is only great when he acts from the passions; never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination.

Benjamin Disraeli

You will find that reason, which always ought to direct mankind, seldom does; but that passions and weaknesses commonly usurp itsseat, and rule in its stead.

Lord Chesterfield

Nature in causing reason and the passions to be born at one and the same time apparently wished by the latter gift to distract man from the evil she had done him by the former, and by only permitting him to live for a few years after the loss of his passions seems to show her pity by early deliverance from a life that reduces him to reason as his sole resource.

Nicolas Chamfort

The conservative has but little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of the passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires and civilisations, doubters, disintegrators, deicides.

John B. S. Haldane

Only the disciplined ones in life are free. If you are undisciplined, you are a slave to your moods and your passions.

Eliud Kipchoge

The body is a slave, the soul a sovereign, and therefore it is due to Divine mercy when the body is worn out by illness: for thereby the passions are weakened, and a man comes to himself; indeed, bodily illness itself is sometimes caused by the passions.

Seraphim of Sarov

Slave power crushes freedom of speech and of opinion. Slave power degrades labor. Slave power is arrogant, is jealous and intrusive, is cruel, is despotic, not only over the slave but over the community, the state.

Elizabeth Van Lew

He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; and he that dares not reason is a slave.

William Drummond

By directing our sentiments, passions, and reason toward the common human plight, imagination grants us the advantages of a moralexistence. What we surrender of innocent love of self is exchanged for the safeties and pleasures of belonging to a larger whole. We are born dependent, but only imagination can bind our passions to other human beings.

Louise J. Kaplan

Never let us do wrong, because our opponents did so. Let us, rather, by doing right, show them what they ought to have done, and establish a rule the dictates of reason and conscience, rather than of the angry passions.

James Joyce

The natural mind is ever prone to reason, when we ought to believe; to be at work, when we ought to be quiet; to go our own way, when we ought steadily to walk on in God's ways, however trying to nature.

George Muller

A Quote by David Hume

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