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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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Rene Descartes
Age: 53 †
Born: 1596
Born: March 31
Died: 1650
Died: February 11
Astronomer
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Mathematician
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La Haye en Touraine
Descartes
Cartesius
Renatus Cartesius
May
Capable
Forsake
Mind
Highest
Likewise
Make
Progress
Provided
Always
Greatest
Slowly
Open
Straight
Excellencies
Greater
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Aberrations
Running
Minds
Aries
Keep
Travel
Aberration

More quotes by Rene Descartes

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He who hid well, lived well.
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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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Mathematics is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other that has been bequeathed to us by human agency.
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[About Pierre de Fermat] It cannot be denied that he has had many exceptional ideas, and that he is a highly intelligent man. For my part, however, I have always been taught to take a broad overview of things, in order to be able to deduce from them general rules, which might be applicable elsewhere.
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A state is better governed which has few laws, and those laws strictly observed.
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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?
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It is contrary to reasoning to say that there is a vacuum or space in which there is absolutely nothing.
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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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But possibly I am something more than I suppose myself to be.
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With me, everything turns into mathematics.
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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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Doubt is the origin of wisdom
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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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Reason is nothing without imagination.
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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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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Sensations are nothing but confused modes of thinking.
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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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Thus each truth discovered was a rule available in the discovery of subsequent ones.
Rene Descartes
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Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems.
Rene Descartes