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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
Astronomer
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La Haye en Touraine
Descartes
Cartesius
Renatus Cartesius
Imagination
Reason
Without
Nothing

More quotes by Rene Descartes

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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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It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.
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In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn, than to contemplate.
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And thereby make ourselves, as it were, the lords and masters of nature.
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Even those who have the weakest souls could acquire absolute mastery over all their passions if we employed sufficient ingenuity in training and guiding them.
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Nothing comes out of nothing.
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How can you be certain that your whole life is not a dream?
Rene Descartes
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Variant: When it is not in our power to follow what is true, we ought to follow what is most probable.
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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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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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I can doubt everything, except one thing, and that is the very fact that I doubt. Simply put - I think, therefore I am
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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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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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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.
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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There is a difference between happiness, the supreme good, and the final end or goal toward which our actions ought to tend. For happiness is not the supreme good, but presupposes it, being the contentment or satisfaction of the mind which results from possessing it.
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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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We never understand a thing so well,and make it our own, as when we have discovered it for ourselves.
Rene Descartes
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Travelling is almost like talking with those of other centuries.
Rene Descartes