Daily Inspiration Quote by David Hume

Hume’s line is a cold splash of water on the Enlightenment fantasy that humans steer themselves by pure thought. “Reason” here isn’t logic in the abstract; it’s the tidy story we tell after the fact, the courtly lawyer hired to justify whatever the client already decided. By contrast, “custom” is the quiet machinery of habit: the repeated patterns of living that feel so natural we stop noticing they’re learned. Hume’s intent is less to sneer at rationality than to demote it. Reason can calculate, compare, and argue, but it doesn’t supply the motives that move a body through a day. Custom does that work, installing defaults: what counts as “normal,” what triggers disgust, what feels polite, what looks like danger, what qualifies as proof.

The subtext is sharp: if custom guides life, then our confidence in certainty is mostly psychological comfort. We believe the sun will rise not because reason guarantees it, but because repetition has trained our expectations. Hume is also taking aim at moral and religious certainty. If moral judgments are anchored in habituated sentiments and social training, then “rational” ethics and theological proofs look less like foundations and more like elaborate veneers over communal practice.

Context matters. Writing in the wake of scientific triumphs and grand rational systems, Hume insists on the fragility underneath: induction is a habit, causation is inferred, the self is stitched together from experience. It’s a philosophy built for adults: skeptical, unsentimental, and uncomfortably compatible with modern life, where algorithmic “nudges” and cultural norms shape behavior long before anyone starts “reasoning” about it.