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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
Cartesius
Renatus Cartesius
Things
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Accustomed
Awake
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More quotes by Rene Descartes

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The reading of all good books is indeed like a conversation with the noblest men of past centuries who were the authors of them, nay a carefully studied conversation, in which they reveal to us none but the best of their thoughts.
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A state is better governed which has few laws, and those laws strictly observed.
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Perfect numbers like perfect men are very rare.
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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.
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Let whoever can do so deceive me, he will never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I continue to think I am something.
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Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.
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In the matter of a difficult question it is more likely that the truth should have been discovered by the few than by the many.
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De omnibus dubitandum
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We never understand a thing so well,and make it our own, as when we have discovered it for ourselves.
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If I found any new truths in the sciences, I can say that they follow from, or depend on, five or six principal problems which I succeeded in solving and which I regard as so many battles where the fortunes of war were on my side.
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Just as we believe by faith that the greatest happiness of the next life consists simply in the contemplation of this divine majesty, likewise we experience that we derive the greatest joy of which we are capable in this life from the same contemplation, even though it is much less perfect.
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Neither the true nor the false roots are always real sometimes they are imaginary that is, while we can always imagine as many roots for each equation as I have assigned, yet there is not always a definite quantity corresponding to each root we have imagined.
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Here I beg you to observe in passing that the scruples that prevented ancient writers from using arithmetical terms in geometry, and which can only be a consequence of their inability to perceive clearly the relation between these two subjects, introduced much obscurity and confusion into their explanations.
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We call infinite that thing whose limits we have not perceived, and so by that word we do not signify what we understand about a thing, but rather what we do not understand.
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Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems.
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I accept no principles of physics which are not also accepted in mathematics.
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With me, everything turns into mathematics.
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I know that I exist the question is, What is this 'I' that 'I' know.
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Give me extension and motion and I will construct the universe.
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The chief cause of human errors is to be found in the prejudices picked up in childhood.
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