René Descartes Quotes

There is no need to allege that Descartes sat in or on a stove. A poêle is simply a room heated by an earthenware stove. Cf. E. Gilson, Discours de la méthode: texte et commentaire, 4th edition (Paris: Vrin, 1967), p. 157.

For it seemed to me that much more truth could be found in the reasonings which a man makes concerning matters that concern him than in those which some scholar makes in his study about speculative matters. For the consequences of the former will soon punish the man if he judges wrongly, whereas the latter have no practical consequences and no importance for the scholar except that perhaps the further they are from common sense the more pride he will take in them, since he will have had to use so much more skill and ingenuity in trying to render them plausible.

entre plusieurs opinions également reçues, je ne choisissais que les plus modérées, tant à cause que ce sont toujours les plus commodes pour la pratique, et vraisemblablement les meilleures, tous excès ayant coutume d'être mauvais, comme aussi afin de me détourner moins du vrai chemin, en cas que je faillisse, que si, ayant choisi l'un des extrêmes, c'eût été l'autre qu'il fallu suivre. (3e partie, para 2)

La existencia de Dios debe tenerse en mi espíritu por tan cierta como las verdades de las matemáticas que no contemplan otra cosa que números y figuras.

those people who formerly had been half wilde, and civiliz’d but by degrees, made their laws but according to the incommodities which their crimes and their quarrels constrain’d them to, could not be so wel pollic’d, as those who from the beginning of their association, observ’d the constitutions of some prudent Legislator.

For the mind depends so much on the temperament and disposition of the bodily organs that, if it is possible to find a means of rendering men wiser and cleverer than they have hitherto been, I believe that it is in medicine that it must be sought. It is true that the medicine which is now in vogue contains little of which the utility is remarkable; but, without having any intention of decrying it, I am sure that there is no one, even among those who make its study a profession, who does not confess that all that men know is almost nothing in comparison with what remains to be known; and that we could be free of an infinitude of maladies both of body and mind, and even also possibly of the infirmities of age, if we had sufficient knowledge of their causes, and of all the remedies with which nature has provided us.

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

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

Nothing can be imagined which is too strange or incredible to have been said by some philosopher.

engaging in conversation with the most cultivated minds of past centuries who had composed them, or rather, taking part in a well-conducted dialogue in which such minds reveal to us only the best of their thoughts;

thought I had said enough respecting them to show that there is nothing observable in the heavens or stars of our system that must not, or at least may not appear precisely alike in those of the system which I described.

seeing that our senses sometimes deceive us, I was willing to suppose that there existed nothing really such as they presented to us; and because some men err in reasoning, and fall into paralogisms, even on the simplest matters of geometry, I, convinced that I was as open to error as any other, rejected as false all the reasonings I had hitherto taken for demonstrations; and finally, when I considered that the very same thoughts (presentations) which we experience when awake may also be experienced when we are asleep, while there is at that time not one of them true, I supposed that all the objects (presentations) that had ever entered into my mind when awake, had in them no more truth than the illusions of my dreams.

Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.

For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it. The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellences, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations...

"Instead of René Descartes' famous "Cogito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am), I propose "Communico ergo sum," (I communicate, therefore I exist") as the philosophical proof of man's existence.