Quote

How can you be certain that your whole life is not a dream?

Rene Descartes

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Rene Descartes
Age: 53 †
Born: 1596
Born: March 31
Died: 1650
Died: February 11
Astronomer
Correspondent
Mathematician
Mechanical Automaton Engineer
Military Personnel
Music Theorist
Musicologist
Philosopher
Physicist
La Haye en Touraine
Descartes
Cartesius
Renatus Cartesius
Dream
Certain
Whole
Life

More quotes by Rene Descartes

Image
With me, everything turns into mathematics.
Rene Descartes
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Wonder is the first of all the passions.
Rene Descartes
Image
Sensations are nothing but confused modes of thinking.
Rene Descartes
Image
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
Image
Intuition is the undoubting conception of a pure and attentive mind, which arises from the light of reason alone, and is more certain than deduction.
Rene Descartes
Image
Travelling is almost like talking with those of other centuries.
Rene Descartes
Image
Even those who have the weakest souls could acquire absolute mastery over all their passions if we employed sufficient ingenuity in training and guiding them.
Rene Descartes
Image
Thus each truth discovered was a rule available in the discovery of subsequent ones.
Rene Descartes
Image
God alone is the author of all the motions in the world.
Rene Descartes
Image
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.
Rene Descartes
Image
The chief cause of human errors is to be found in the prejudices picked up in childhood.
Rene Descartes
Image
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.
Rene Descartes
Image
It is possible that I am dreaming right now and that all of my perceptions are false.
Rene Descartes
Image
And thereby make ourselves, as it were, the lords and masters of nature.
Rene Descartes
Image
How do we know that anything really exists, that anything is really the way it seems ot us through our senses?
Rene Descartes
Image
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.
Rene Descartes
Image
I hope that posterity will judge me kindly, not only as to the things which I have explained, but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery.
Rene Descartes
Image
Neither the true nor the false roots are always real sometimes they are imaginary that is, while we can always imagine as many roots for each equation as I have assigned, yet there is not always a definite quantity corresponding to each root we have imagined.
Rene Descartes