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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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La Haye en Touraine
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More quotes by 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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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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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.
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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The nature of matter, or body considered in general, consists not in its being something which is hard or heavy or coloured, or which affects the senses in any way, but simply in its being something which is extended in length, breadth and depth.
Rene Descartes
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I can doubt everything, except one thing, and that is the very fact that I doubt. Simply put - I think, therefore I am
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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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.
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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I accept no principles of physics which are not also accepted in mathematics.
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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Everything is self-evident.
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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I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. What is there then that can be taken as true? Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain.
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.
Rene Descartes
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Perfect numbers like perfect men are very rare.
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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Omnia apud me mathematica fiunt.
Rene Descartes
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It is possible that I am dreaming right now and that all of my perceptions are false.
Rene Descartes
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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.
Rene Descartes