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I hope that posterity will judge me kindly, not only as to the things which I have explained, but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery.

Rene Descartes

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Rene Descartes
Age: 53 †
Born: 1596
Born: March 31
Died: 1650
Died: February 11
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More quotes by Rene Descartes

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How can you be certain that your whole life is not a dream?
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A person has two passions for love and abhorrence. A big disposition to excessiveness has just a love, because it is more ardent and stronger.
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I am thing that thinks: that is, a things that doubts,affirms, denies, understands a few things, is ignorant of many things, is willing, is unwilling, and also which imagines and has sensory perceptions.
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Whenever anyone has offended me, I try to raise my soul so high that the offense cannot reach it.
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In God there is an infinitude of things which I cannot comprehend, nor possibly even reach in any way by thought for it is the nature of the infinite that my nature, which is finite and limited, should not comprehend it.
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For I found myself embarrassed with so many doubts and errors that it seemed to me that the effort to instruct myself had no effect other than th eincreasing discovery of my own ignorance
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Sensations are nothing but confused modes of thinking.
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The two operations of our understanding, intuition and deduction, on which alone we have said we must rely in the acquisition of knowledge.
Rene Descartes
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I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.
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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 a little gland in the brain in which the soul exercises its functions in a more particular way than in the other parts.
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Common sense is the best distributed thing in the world, for we all think we possess a good share of it.
Rene Descartes
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The rainbow is such a remarkable phenomenon of nature, and its cause has been so meticulously sought after by inquiring minds throughout the ages, that I could not choose a more appropriate subject for demonstrating how, with the method I am using, we can arrive at knowledge not possessed at all by those whose writings are available to us.
Rene Descartes
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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.
Rene Descartes
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And I shall always hold myself more obliged to those by whose favour I enjoy uninterrupted leisure than to any who might offer me the most honourable positions in the world.
Rene Descartes
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Illusory joy is often worth more than genuine sorrow.
Rene Descartes
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I was convinced that our beliefs are based much more on custom and example than on any certain knowledge.
Rene Descartes
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We never understand a thing so well,and make it our own, as when we have discovered it for ourselves.
Rene Descartes
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For how do we know that the thoughts which occur in dreaming are false rather than those others which we experience when awake, since the former are often not less vivid and distinct than the latter?
Rene Descartes
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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.
Rene Descartes