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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.

Rene Descartes

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Rene Descartes
Age: 53 †
Born: 1596
Born: March 31
Died: 1650
Died: February 11
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La Haye en Touraine
Descartes
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Renatus Cartesius
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More quotes by Rene Descartes

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It's the familiar love-hate syndrome of seduction: I don't really care what it is I say, I care only that you like it.
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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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[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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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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Wonder is the first of all the passions.
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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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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 two operations of our understanding, intuition and deduction, on which alone we have said we must rely in the acquisition of knowledge.
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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
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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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But possibly I am something more than I suppose myself to be.
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Travelling is almost like talking with those of other centuries.
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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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The only secure knowledge is that I exist.
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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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... moral certainty is certainty which is sufficient to regulate our behaviour, or which measures up to the certainty we have on matters relating to the conduct of life which we never normally doubt, though we know that it is possible, absolutely speaking, that they may be false.
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We never understand a thing so well,and make it our own, as when we have discovered it for ourselves.
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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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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.
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If I go for the alternative which is false, then obviously I shall be in error if I take the other side, then it is by... chance that I arrive at the truth, and I shall still be at fault.... In this incorrect use of free will may be found the privation which constitutes the essence of error.
Rene Descartes