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I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.

Rene Descartes

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Rene Descartes
Age: 53 †
Born: 1596
Born: March 31
Died: 1650
Died: February 11
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La Haye en Touraine
Descartes
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Renatus Cartesius
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More quotes by Rene Descartes

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[About Pierre de Fermat] It cannot be denied that he has had many exceptional ideas, and that he is a highly intelligent man. For my part, however, I have always been taught to take a broad overview of things, in order to be able to deduce from them general rules, which might be applicable elsewhere.
Rene Descartes
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In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn, than to contemplate.
Rene Descartes
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I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. What is there then that can be taken as true? Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain.
Rene Descartes
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The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellencies, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations and those who travel very slowly may yet make far greater progress, provided they keep always to the straight road, than those who, while they run, forsake it.
Rene Descartes
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The chief cause of human errors is to be found in the prejudices picked up in childhood.
Rene Descartes
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Doubt is the origin of wisdom
Rene Descartes
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A state is better governed which has few laws, and those laws strictly observed.
Rene Descartes
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Perfect numbers like perfect men are very rare.
Rene Descartes
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Situations in life often permit no delay and when we cannot determine the course which is certainly best, we must follow the one which is probably the best. This frame of mind freed me also from the repentance and remorse commonly felt by those vacillating individuals who are always seeking as worthwhile things which they later judge to be bad.
Rene Descartes
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Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the self-same well from which your laughter rises was often-times filled with your tears.
Rene Descartes
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The only thing we have power over in the universe is our own thoughts.
Rene Descartes
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There is nothing more ancient than the truth.
Rene Descartes
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Variant: When it is not in our power to follow what is true, we ought to follow what is most probable.
Rene Descartes
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Give me extension and motion and I will construct the universe.
Rene Descartes
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Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.
Rene Descartes
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I can doubt everything, except one thing, and that is the very fact that I doubt. Simply put - I think, therefore I am
Rene Descartes
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This result could have been achieved either by his [God] endowing my intellect with a clear and distinct perception of everything about which I would ever deliberate, or simply by impressing the following rule so firmly upon my memory that I could never forget it: I should never judge anything that I do not clearly and distinctly understand.
Rene Descartes
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If I go for the alternative which is false, then obviously I shall be in error if I take the other side, then it is by... chance that I arrive at the truth, and I shall still be at fault.... In this incorrect use of free will may be found the privation which constitutes the essence of error.
Rene Descartes
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Thus each truth discovered was a rule available in the discovery of subsequent ones.
Rene Descartes
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How do we know that anything really exists, that anything is really the way it seems ot us through our senses?
Rene Descartes