Rene Descartes Quotes - Page 4

Neither divine grace nor natural knowledge ever diminishes freedom.

My third maxim was to try always to conquer myself rather than fortune, and to change my desires rather than the order of the world, and generally to accustom myself to believing that there is nothing entirely in our power except our thoughts, so that after we have done our best regarding things external to us, everything in which we do not succeed is for us absolutely impossible.

In philosophy, when we make use of false principles, we depart the farther from the knowledge of truth and wisdom exactly in proportion to the care with which we cultivate them, and apply ourselves to the deduction of diverse consequences from them, thinking that we are philosophizing well, while we are only departing the farther from the truth; from which it must be inferred that they who have learned the least of all that has been hitherto distinguished by the name of philosophy are the most fitted for the apprehension of truth.

Divide each difficulty at hand into as many pieces as possible and as could be required to better solve them.

The only secure knowledge is that I exist.

There is nothing so far removed from us as to be beyond our reach, or so hidden that we cannot discover it.

The two operations of our understanding, intuition and deduction, on which alone we have said we must rely in the acquisition of knowledge.

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.

I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions; I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. What is there then that can be taken as true? Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain.

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.

The principal effect of the passions is that they incite and persuade the mind to will the events for which they prepared the body.

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.

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.

These long chains of perfectly simple and easy reasonings by means of which geometers are accustomed to carry out their most difficult demonstrations had led me to fancy that everything that can fall under human knowledge forms a similar sequence; and that so long as we avoid accepting as true what is not so, and always preserve the right order of deduction of one thing from another, there can be nothing too remote to be reached in the end, or to well hidden to be discovered.

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?

How do we know that anything really exists, that anything is really the way it seems ot us through our senses?

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

There is a great difference between mind and body insomuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible.

If ... it is not in my power to arrive at the knowledge of any truth, I may at least do what is in my power, namely, suspend judgement.

Variant: When it is not in our power to follow what is true, we ought to follow what is most probable.

Now therefore, that my mind is free from all cares, and that I have obtained for myself assured leisure in peaceful solitude, I shall apply myself seriously and freely to the general destruction of all my former opinions.

... regard this body as a machine which, having been made by the hand of God, is incomparably better ordered than any machine that can be devised by man, and contains in itself movements more wonderful than those in any machine. ... it is for all practical purposes impossible for a machine to have enough organs to make it act in all the contingencies of life in the way in which our reason makes us act.

The principal use of prudence, of self-control, is that it teaches us to be masters of our passions, and to so control and guide them that the evils which they cause are quite bearable, and that we even derive joy from them all.

Instead I ought to be grateful to Him who never owed me anything for having been so generous to me, rather than think that He deprived me of those things or has taken away from me whatever He did not give me.

The mind effortlessly and automatically takes in new ideas, which remain in limbo until verified or rejected by conscious, rational analysis.