Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them.

This line is commonly attributed to David Hume in connection with his aesthetics—especially his argument that judgments of beauty are grounded in human sentiment rather than in objective properties of objects. It aligns closely with the position he develops in his essay “Of the Standard of Taste,” where he explains that beauty is not a quality in things themselves but an effect produced in the perceiver. The wording as quoted, however, is typically encountered as a paraphrase or popular formulation of Hume’s view rather than a verbatim sentence that can be confidently tied to a specific edition and page without further verification.

Hume’s claim shifts beauty from the object to the subject: what we call “beautiful” is the mind’s experience when contemplating something, not a measurable feature like shape or color. This does not necessarily make beauty arbitrary; for Hume, shared human nature and cultivated sensibility can produce convergence in taste, even though the source of the judgment is feeling. The quote thus underwrites a sentimentalist account of aesthetics: beauty is real as an experience, but it is not an intrinsic property independent of observers. It also anticipates later discussions of projection and response-dependent properties in philosophy.