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Everything is self-evident.

Rene Descartes

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Rene Descartes
Age: 53 †
Born: 1596
Born: March 31
Died: 1650
Died: February 11
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Descartes
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It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.
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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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I was convinced that our beliefs are based much more on custom and example than on any certain knowledge.
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God alone is the author of all the motions in the world.
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The only secure knowledge is that I exist.
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I know that I exist the question is, What is this 'I' that 'I' know.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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And thereby make ourselves, as it were, the lords and masters of nature.
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Omnia apud me mathematica fiunt.
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On the one hand I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, in so far as I am a thinking, non-extended thing and on the other hand I have a distinct idea of body, in so far a this is simply an extended, non-thinking thing. And, accordingly, it is certain that I am really distinct from my body, and exist without it.
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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
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We never understand a thing so well,and make it our own, as when we have discovered it for ourselves.
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How can you be certain that your whole life is not a dream?
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But possibly I am something more than I suppose myself to be.
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It's the familiar love-hate syndrome of seduction: I don't really care what it is I say, I care only that you like it.
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