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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
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La Haye en Touraine
Descartes
Cartesius
Renatus Cartesius
Many
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More quotes by Rene Descartes

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When I consider this carefully, I find not a single property which with certainty separates the waking state from the dream. How can you be certain that your whole life is not a dream?
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...it is certain that I am really distinct from my body, and can exist without it.
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I should consider that I know nothing about physics if I were able to explain only how things might be, and were unable to demonstrate that they could not be otherwise.
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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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If I simply refrain from making a judgment in cases where I do not perceive the truth with sufficient clarity and distinctness, then it is clear that I am behaving correctly and avoiding error.
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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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Conquer yourself rather than the world.
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But possibly I am something more than I suppose myself to be.
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There is a difference between happiness, the supreme good, and the final end or goal toward which our actions ought to tend. For happiness is not the supreme good, but presupposes it, being the contentment or satisfaction of the mind which results from possessing it.
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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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Mathematics is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other that has been bequeathed to us by human agency.
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Thus each truth discovered was a rule available in the discovery of subsequent ones.
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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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Illusory joy is often worth more than genuine sorrow.
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The only secure knowledge is that I exist.
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We do not describe the world we see, we see the world we can describe.
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... moral certainty is certainty which is sufficient to regulate our behaviour, or which measures up to the certainty we have on matters relating to the conduct of life which we never normally doubt, though we know that it is possible, absolutely speaking, that they may be false.
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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.
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Instead I ought to be grateful to Him who never owed me anything for having been so generous to me, rather than think that He deprived me of those things or has taken away from me whatever He did not give me.
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If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
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