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Wonder is the first of all the passions.

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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Cartesius
Renatus Cartesius
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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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Common sense is the best distributed thing in the world, for we all think we possess a good share of it.
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Thus each truth discovered was a rule available in the discovery of subsequent ones.
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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.
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We call infinite that thing whose limits we have not perceived, and so by that word we do not signify what we understand about a thing, but rather what we do not understand.
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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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Reason is nothing without imagination.
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Doubt is the origin of wisdom
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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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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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...it is certain that I am really distinct from my body, and can exist without it.
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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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God alone is the author of all the motions in the world.
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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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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.
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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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A state is better governed which has few laws, and those laws strictly observed.
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Divide each difficulty at hand into as many pieces as possible and as could be required to better solve them.
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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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