Happiness Quote by David Hume

Hume dresses a radical claim in the plain clothes of common sense: wealth isn’t a pile of assets but a posture of mind. “Propensity” does a lot of work here. He’s not praising naive optimism or a one-off good mood; he’s talking about a durable disposition, a habitual way the mind tilts when it meets uncertainty. That framing is surgical Hume: human life is governed less by pure reason than by sentiment and custom, so the deepest “economy” is emotional and psychological. If the mind’s default settings are hope and joy, you’re effectively liquid; you can meet volatility without being wiped out. If they’re fear and sorrow, every event becomes a margin call.

The subtext is quietly anti-aristocratic. Hume wrote in an 18th-century Britain where commerce was rising and moralists worried it would corrode virtue. He flips the moral ledger: the real impoverishment is internal, not merely material, and it can afflict the wealthy as easily as the poor. At the same time, he avoids pious cheerleading. “Real riches” and “real poverty” aren’t metaphors for karma; they’re diagnoses about lived experience. Your subjective world is where status, security, and suffering actually register.

There’s also a proto-therapeutic edge: cultivate the hopeful disposition and you change the felt texture of life, not by denying pain but by refusing to let fear become your governing principle. Hume’s wit is that he makes this sound obvious, then leaves you realizing how much of modern “success” is just well-funded anxiety.