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Mathematics is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other that has been bequeathed to us by human agency.

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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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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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.
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There is a little gland in the brain in which the soul exercises its functions in a more particular way than in the other parts.
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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.
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Omnia apud me mathematica fiunt.
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Illusory joy is often worth more than genuine sorrow.
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The only secure knowledge is that I exist.
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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.
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Instead I ought to be grateful to Him who never owed me anything for having been so generous to me, rather than think that He deprived me of those things or has taken away from me whatever He did not give me.
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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.
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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.
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In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn, than to contemplate.
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I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.
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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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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.
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Perfect numbers like perfect men are very rare.
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Even if I were to suppose that I was dreaming and whatever I saw or imagined was false, yet I could not deny that ideas were truly in my mind.
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We do not describe the world we see, we see the world we can describe.
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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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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