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Few look for truth many prowl about for a reputation of profundity by arrogantly challenging whichever arguments are the best.

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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La Haye en Touraine
Descartes
Cartesius
Renatus Cartesius
Look
Profundity
Looks
Arguments
Many
Challenging
Reputation
Argument
Challenges
Prowl
Truth
Arrogantly
Best
Whichever

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The only thing we have power over in the universe is our own thoughts.
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Let whoever can do so deceive me, he will never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I continue to think I am something.
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And thereby make ourselves, as it were, the lords and masters of nature.
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...it is certain that I am really distinct from my body, and can exist without it.
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With me, everything turns into mathematics.
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In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn, than to contemplate.
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Illusory joy is often worth more than genuine sorrow.
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The chief cause of human errors is to be found in the prejudices picked up in childhood.
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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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But possibly I am something more than I suppose myself to be.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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Sensations are nothing but confused modes of thinking.
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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?
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Travelling is almost like talking with those of other centuries.
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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?
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I accept no principles of physics which are not also accepted in mathematics.
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Here I beg you to observe in passing that the scruples that prevented ancient writers from using arithmetical terms in geometry, and which can only be a consequence of their inability to perceive clearly the relation between these two subjects, introduced much obscurity and confusion into their explanations.
Rene Descartes