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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?

Rene Descartes

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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
False
Thoughts
Distinct
Since
Vivid
Rather
Dreaming
Less
Occur
Often
Latter
Experience
Awake
Others
Former

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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.
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Illusory joy is often worth more than genuine sorrow.
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Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.
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It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.
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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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Give me extension and motion and I will construct the universe.
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God alone is the author of all the motions in the world.
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A state is better governed which has few laws, and those laws strictly observed.
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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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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?
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I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. What is there then that can be taken as true? Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain.
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I should consider that I know nothing about physics if I were able to explain only how things might be, and were unable to demonstrate that they could not be otherwise.
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And I shall always hold myself more obliged to those by whose favour I enjoy uninterrupted leisure than to any who might offer me the most honourable positions in the world.
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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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Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the self-same well from which your laughter rises was often-times filled with your tears.
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Mathematics is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other that has been bequeathed to us by human agency.
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It is to the body alone that we should attribute everything that can be observed in us to oppose our reason.
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