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.

Philosophers
David Hume
Scottish philosopher (1711-1776), master of British empiricism. His Treatise of Human Nature (1739) reduced causality to psychological habit and shook 2000 years of metaphysics. Kant said Hume broke his dogmatic slumber.
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David Hume's Other Quotes
Related Quotes
The wise man is free from passions, not because he does not feel, but because his judgments are correct.
-- Chrysippus of Soli
Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
-- Bertrand Russell
I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.
-- Benedictus de Spinoza
The divine law commands rational consideration of existing things and reflection upon them.
-- Averroes
The pleasant life is produced not by endless drinking and revelry but by sober reasoning.
-- Epicurus
The good, in a word, is the realization of personality.
-- Kitarō Nishida