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Reason is nothing without imagination.

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
Cartesius
Renatus Cartesius
Imagination
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Without
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More quotes by Rene Descartes

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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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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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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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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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Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.
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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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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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Hence reason also demands that, since our thoughts cannot all be true because we are not wholly perfect, what truth they do possess must inevitably be found in the thoughts we have when awake, rather than in our dreams.
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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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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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On the one hand I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, in so far as I am a thinking, non-extended thing and on the other hand I have a distinct idea of body, in so far a this is simply an extended, non-thinking thing. And, accordingly, it is certain that I am really distinct from my body, and exist without it.
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But possibly I am something more than I suppose myself to be.
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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.
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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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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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With me, everything turns into mathematics.
Rene Descartes
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Neither the true nor the false roots are always real sometimes they are imaginary that is, while we can always imagine as many roots for each equation as I have assigned, yet there is not always a definite quantity corresponding to each root we have imagined.
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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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I accept no principles of physics which are not also accepted in mathematics.
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God alone is the author of all the motions in the world.
Rene Descartes