Quotes About Truth

I will follow this strategy until I discover something that is certain or, at least, until I discover that it is certain only that nothing is certain.

On the other hand, I compared the disquisitions of the ancient moralists to very towering and magnificent palaces with no better foundation than sand and mud:

It is enough that I can understand one thing, clearly and distinctly, without another in order to be certain that one thing is distinct from the other.

Je puis me persuader d'avoir été fait tel par la nature que je puisse aisément me tromper même dans les choses que je crois comprendre avec le plus d'évidence et de certitude.

One needs to know what thought is, what existence is and what certainty is.

For indeed when painters themselves wish to represent sirens and satyrs [20] by means of especially bizarre forms, they surely cannot assign to them utterly new natures. Rather, they simply fuse together the members of various animals. Or if perhaps they concoct something so utterly novel that nothing like it has ever been seen before (and thus is something utterly fictitious and false), yet certainly at the very least the colors from which they fashion it ought to be true. And

we ought also to consider as false all that is doubtful.

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

while I wanted thus to think that everything was false, it necessarily had to be the case that I, who was thinking this, was something. And noticing that this truth—I think, therefore I am—was so firm and so assured that all the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were incapable of shaking it, I judged that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking.

Con frecuencia una falsa alegría vale más que una tristeza cuya causa es verdadera.

And it is evident that it is not less repugnant that falsity or imperfection, in so far as it is imperfection, should proceed from God, than that truth or perfection should proceed from nothing.

As regards the soul, many people thought that its nature cannot easily be investigated, and some have even dared say that human reason shows us that the soul dies with the body and that the contrary view is held by faith alone; however, the Lateran Council, held under Leo X (Session 8), condemns them and explicitly commands Christian philosophers to defeat their arguments and prove the truth to the best of their abilities, and therefore I too have not hesitated to take on this challenge.

Be that as it may, there is fixed in my mind a certain opinion of long [21] standing, namely that there exists a God who is able to do anything and by whom I, such as I am, have been created. How do I know that he did not bring it about that there is no earth at all, no heavens, no extended thing, no shape, no size, no place, and yet bringing it about that all these things appear to me to exist precisely as they do now?

c'est une vérité très certaine que, lorsqu'il n'est pas en notre pouvoir de discerner les plus vraies opinions, nous devons suivre les plus probables partie 3, para 3)

He cannot be a deceiver, since the light of nature teaches us that fraud and deception necessarily proceed from some defect.

the more uncommon often only mislead us so long as the causes of the more ordinary are still unknown;

Science in its entirety is true and evident cognition.

Right understanding is the most equally divided thing in the World; for every one beleevs himself so well stor'd with it, that even those who in all other things are the hardest to be pleas'd, seldom desire more of it then they have; wherein it is not likely that all Men are deceived:

And let him do his best at deception, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I shall think that I am something.

hay pocas personas que consientan en decir lo que creen, sino también porque muchas lo ignoran, pues el acto del pensamiento, por el cual uno cree una cosa, es diferente de aquel otro por el cual uno conoce que la cree

I am, I exist" is necessarily true every time I utter it or conceive it in my mind.

y que dice que nada hay en el entendimiento que no haya estado antes en el sentido

Daha zor olan?, daha güzel olarak addetmek ölümlülerin ortak kusurudur.

We should totally focus the vision of natural intelligence on the smallest and easiest things, and we should dwell on them for a long time, so long, until we have become accustomed to intuiting the truth distinctly and perspicuously.