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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

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Rene Descartes
Age: 53 †
Born: 1596
Born: March 31
Died: 1650
Died: February 11
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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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The only thing we have power over in the universe is our own thoughts.
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A state is better governed which has few laws, and those laws strictly observed.
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Travelling is almost like talking with those of other centuries.
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De omnibus dubitandum
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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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I was convinced that our beliefs are based much more on custom and example than on any certain knowledge.
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Just as we believe by faith that the greatest happiness of the next life consists simply in the contemplation of this divine majesty, likewise we experience that we derive the greatest joy of which we are capable in this life from the same contemplation, even though it is much less perfect.
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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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It is possible that I am dreaming right now and that all of my perceptions are 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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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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Wonder is the first of all the passions.
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If I found any new truths in the sciences, I can say that they follow from, or depend on, five or six principal problems which I succeeded in solving and which I regard as so many battles where the fortunes of war were on my side.
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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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In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn, than to contemplate.
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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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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.
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And thereby make ourselves, as it were, the lords and masters of nature.
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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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