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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
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Refrain
Simply
Avoiding
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Clarity
Truth
Perceive
Sufficient
Distinctness
Errors
Behaving
Judgment
Correctly

More quotes by Rene Descartes

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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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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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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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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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We do not describe the world we see, we see the world we can describe.
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Illusory joy is often worth more than genuine sorrow.
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A state is better governed which has few laws, and those laws strictly observed.
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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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If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
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I hope that posterity will judge me kindly, not only as to the things which I have explained, but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery.
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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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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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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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Thus each truth discovered was a rule available in the discovery of subsequent ones.
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And thereby make ourselves, as it were, the lords and masters of nature.
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Everybody thinks himself so well supplied with common sense that even those most difficult to please. . . never desire more of it than they already have.
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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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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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I know that I exist the question is, What is this 'I' that 'I' know.
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Nothing comes out of nothing.
Rene Descartes