Beauty in things lies in the mind which contemplates them.

The line is commonly attributed to David Hume in connection with his aesthetics, especially his argument that judgments of beauty are not perceptions of an objective property in objects but sentiments produced in observers. Hume developed this view most fully in his essay on taste, written in the mid-18th century amid Enlightenment debates about whether beauty and artistic merit could be grounded in reason, rules, or “real” qualities. In that context, Hume treats beauty as dependent on human psychology and experience, while still trying to explain why some judgments of taste can be more reliable than others (e.g., those of practiced, attentive critics).

The quotation expresses a subjectivist thesis about beauty: what we call “beauty” is not a feature residing in the object itself, but a response—pleasure, approval, or sentiment—arising in the perceiver. It shifts aesthetic evaluation from the world to the mind, implying that different observers can legitimately experience the same thing differently. At the same time, in Hume’s broader treatment, this does not collapse into “anything goes”: he argues that education, comparison, delicacy of perception, and freedom from prejudice can refine taste, making some aesthetic judgments more dependable even though beauty is grounded in feeling rather than in objective properties.