Daily Inspiration Quote by David Hume

Hume drops the mic on the Enlightenment fantasy that humans are little logic engines who occasionally get messy. His line is deliberately provocative because it flips the era's prestige hierarchy: reason doesn’t rule; it runs errands. The phrasing is doing a lot of work. “Is, and ought only to be” isn’t just descriptive psychology, it’s a normative jab at moral rationalists who wanted ethics to be derivable the way geometry is. Hume is telling them: even if you could build a perfect syllogism, it still wouldn’t move a human body unless some desire, fear, attachment, or aversion put fuel in the tank.

The subtext is less anti-intellectual than anti-self-deceit. Hume isn’t praising impulsiveness; he’s stripping away the comforting story we tell ourselves after the fact. Reason “pretend[s]” to command because we like thinking our choices come stamped with impartial authority. In practice, reason mostly functions like a good press secretary: it marshals evidence, invents coherence, and sanitizes motives that began elsewhere. That cynicism is the point. It’s a warning about how easily “rational” justifications become moral cover for what we already want.

Context matters: Hume is writing against thinkers who grounded morality in pure reason and treated passions as noise to be silenced. He instead locates moral judgment in sentiment and habit, making ethics a social and psychological project, not an algebra problem. The line still stings today because it explains both our personal contradictions and our public ones: technocratic arguments don’t persuade unless they touch identity, status, and belonging. Reason can map the route; passion chooses the destination.