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Thus each truth discovered was a rule available in the discovery of subsequent ones.

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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... 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.
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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Travelling is almost like talking with those of other centuries.
Rene Descartes
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If I go for the alternative which is false, then obviously I shall be in error if I take the other side, then it is by... chance that I arrive at the truth, and I shall still be at fault.... In this incorrect use of free will may be found the privation which constitutes the essence of error.
Rene Descartes
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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.
Rene Descartes
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In God there is an infinitude of things which I cannot comprehend, nor possibly even reach in any way by thought for it is the nature of the infinite that my nature, which is finite and limited, should not comprehend it.
Rene Descartes
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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.
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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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 only thing we have power over in the universe is our own thoughts.
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?
Rene Descartes
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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?
Rene Descartes
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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.
Rene Descartes
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Omnia apud me mathematica fiunt.
Rene Descartes
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There is nothing more ancient than the truth.
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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Whenever anyone has offended me, I try to raise my soul so high that the offense cannot reach it.
Rene Descartes
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Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems.
Rene Descartes
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There is a great difference between mind and body insomuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible.
Rene Descartes
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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.
Rene Descartes