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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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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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Illusory joy is often worth more than genuine sorrow.
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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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.
Rene Descartes
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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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In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn, than to contemplate.
Rene Descartes
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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.
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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The only secure knowledge is that I exist.
Rene Descartes
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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.
Rene Descartes
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Everybody thinks himself so well supplied with common sense that even those most difficult to please. . . never desire more of it than they already have.
Rene Descartes
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How can you be certain that your whole life is not a dream?
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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Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.
Rene Descartes
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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.
Rene Descartes
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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.
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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I know that I exist the question is, What is this 'I' that 'I' know.
Rene Descartes
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Hence reason also demands that, since our thoughts cannot all be true because we are not wholly perfect, what truth they do possess must inevitably be found in the thoughts we have when awake, rather than in our dreams.
Rene Descartes
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Intuition is the undoubting conception of a pure and attentive mind, which arises from the light of reason alone, and is more certain than deduction.
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