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How can you be certain that your whole life is not a dream?
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
Mechanical Automaton Engineer
Military Personnel
Music Theorist
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La Haye en Touraine
Descartes
Cartesius
Renatus Cartesius
Dream
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Life
More quotes by Rene Descartes
For I found myself embarrassed with so many doubts and errors that it seemed to me that the effort to instruct myself had no effect other than th eincreasing discovery of my own ignorance
Rene Descartes
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
Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.
Rene Descartes
In the matter of a difficult question it is more likely that the truth should have been discovered by the few than by the many.
Rene Descartes
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.
Rene Descartes
We never understand a thing so well,and make it our own, as when we have discovered it for ourselves.
Rene Descartes
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.
Rene Descartes
It is to the body alone that we should attribute everything that can be observed in us to oppose our reason.
Rene Descartes
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
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
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
I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.
Rene Descartes
So blind is the curiosity by which mortals are possessed, that they often conduct their minds along unexplored routes, having no reason to hope for success, but merely being willing to risk the experiment of finding whether the truth they seek lies there.
Rene Descartes
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.
Rene Descartes
But possibly I am something more than I suppose myself to be.
Rene Descartes
Omnia apud me mathematica fiunt.
Rene Descartes
The chief cause of human errors is to be found in the prejudices picked up in childhood.
Rene Descartes
Mathematics is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other that has been bequeathed to us by human agency.
Rene Descartes
For how do we know that the thoughts which occur in dreaming are false rather than those others which we experience when awake, since the former are often not less vivid and distinct than the latter?
Rene Descartes
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
