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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

Rene Descartes

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Rene Descartes
Age: 53 †
Born: 1596
Born: March 31
Died: 1650
Died: February 11
Astronomer
Correspondent
Mathematician
Mechanical Automaton Engineer
Military Personnel
Music Theorist
Musicologist
Philosopher
Physicist
La Haye en Touraine
Descartes
Cartesius
Renatus Cartesius
Doubt
Doubts
Effort
Embarrassed
Found
Errors
Many
Effect
Seemed
Discovery
Ignorance
Effects
Instruct

More quotes by Rene Descartes

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With me, everything turns into mathematics.
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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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Reason is nothing without imagination.
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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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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.
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The principal effect of the passions is that they incite and persuade the mind to will the events for which they prepared the body.
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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.
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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.
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Omnia apud me mathematica fiunt.
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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?
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Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.
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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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Give me extension and motion and I will construct the universe.
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It is contrary to reasoning to say that there is a vacuum or space in which there is absolutely nothing.
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.
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In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn, than to contemplate.
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.
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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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There is nothing more ancient than the truth.
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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