Quotes from Rene Descartes

It is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived.

You just keep pushing. You just keep pushing. I made every mistake that could be made. But I just kept pushing.

To live without philosophizing is in truth the same as keeping the eyes closed without attempting to open them.

In order to seek truth, it is necessary once in the course of our life to doubt, as far as possible, of all things.

Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it.

Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems

The senses deceive from time to time, and it is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us even once.

Whenever anyone has offended me, I try to raise my soul so high that the offense cannot reach it.

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

I suppose the body to be just a statue or a machine made of earth.

I am indeed amazed when I consider how weak my mind is and how prone to error.

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

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.

It is well to know something of the manners of various peoples, in order more sanely to judge our own, and that we do not think that everything against our modes is ridiculous, and against reason, as those who have seen nothing are accustomed to think.

Everything is self-evident.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.

Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense - no one needs more of it than one already has

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the self-same well from which your laughter rises was often-times filled with your tears.

With me, everything turns into mathematics.

Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.

But I cannot forget that, at other times I have been deceived in sleep by similar illusions; and, attentively considering those cases, I perceive so clearly that there exist no certain marks by which the state of waking can ever be distinguished from sleep, that I feel greatly astonished; and in amazement I almost persuade myself that I am now dreaming.

Whatever I have up till now accepted as most true and assured I have gotten either from the senses or through the senses. But from time to time I have found that the senses deceive, and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.

I think; therefore I am.

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.