Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.

Hume makes this remark in the context of his empiricist account of perception and sentiment, arguing that many evaluative properties (including beauty) are not “in” objects the way shape or motion are, but arise from the response of a perceiver. The line is commonly cited from his essay on aesthetics, where he addresses the apparent variability of taste across individuals and cultures and asks how, despite this variability, we still speak meaningfully about better and worse judgments in art. The claim sets up his broader project of explaining aesthetic disagreement and the possibility of standards of taste without treating beauty as an objective, mind-independent property.

The quote states a subjectivist thesis: beauty is not an intrinsic feature of an object but a mental effect produced in the observer. Because different minds have different sensibilities, experiences, and associations, they “see” different beauties in the same thing. Hume’s point is not merely relativistic dismissal; it reframes aesthetic judgment as grounded in human psychology and sentiment rather than in demonstrable facts. This helps explain why arguments about taste often stall—people are not disputing measurable properties but reporting responses. At the same time, Hume elsewhere suggests that some judgments can be more reliable than others when formed by practiced, attentive, and unbiased critics.