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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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Few look for truth many prowl about for a reputation of profundity by arrogantly challenging whichever arguments are the best.
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A state is better governed which has few laws, and those laws strictly observed.
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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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With me, everything turns into mathematics.
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Divide each difficulty at hand into as many pieces as possible and as could be required to better solve them.
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Omnia apud me mathematica fiunt.
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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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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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... 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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It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.
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...it is certain that I am really distinct from my body, and can exist without it.
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Reason is nothing without imagination.
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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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Sensations are nothing but confused modes of thinking.
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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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Whenever anyone has offended me, I try to raise my soul so high that the offense cannot reach it.
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We call infinite that thing whose limits we have not perceived, and so by that word we do not signify what we understand about a thing, but rather what we do not understand.
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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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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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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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