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If I simply refrain from making a judgment in cases where I do not perceive the truth with sufficient clarity and distinctness, then it is clear that I am behaving correctly and avoiding error.

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
Cases
Refrain
Simply
Avoiding
Error
Clear
Clarity
Making
Perceive
Truth
Sufficient
Distinctness
Errors
Behaving
Judgment
Correctly

More quotes by Rene Descartes

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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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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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It is contrary to reasoning to say that there is a vacuum or space in which there is absolutely nothing.
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I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.
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Sensations are nothing but confused modes of thinking.
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We do not describe the world we see, we see the world we can describe.
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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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And thereby make ourselves, as it were, the lords and masters of nature.
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Nothing comes out of nothing.
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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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Wonder is the first of all the passions.
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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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Give me extension and motion and I will construct the universe.
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Even if I were to suppose that I was dreaming and whatever I saw or imagined was false, yet I could not deny that ideas were truly in my mind.
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Travelling is almost like talking with those of other centuries.
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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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He who hid well, lived well.
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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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Doubt is the origin of wisdom
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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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