Quotes from Rene Descartes

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

There is nothing so strange and so unbelievable that it has not been said by one philosopher or another.

Doubt is the origin of wisdom

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

Because reason...is the only thing that makes us men, and distinguishes us from the beasts, I would prefer to believe that it exists, in its entirety, in each of us.

The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt.

For each of us there is a set limit to our intellectual powers which we cannot pass.

One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.

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

And as it is the most generous souls who have most gratitude, it is those who have most pride, and who are most base and infirm, who most allow themselves to be carried away by anger and hatred.

Perfect numbers like perfect men are very rare.

Desire awakens only to things that are thought possible.

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.

For how do we know that the thoughts which occur in dreaming are false rather than those others which we experience when awake, since the former are often not less vivid and distinct than the latter?