René Descartes Quotes

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

For the very fact that my knowledge is increasing little by little is the most certain argument for its imperfection.

Common sense is the best distributed commodity in the world, for every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it.

Whence then come my errors? They come from the sole fact that since the will is much wider in its range and compass than the understanding, I do not restrain it within the same bounds, but extend it also to things which I do not understand: and as the will is of itself indifferent to these, it easily falls into error and sin, and chooses the evil for the good, or the false for the true.

De omnibus dubitandum. (Doubt everything.)

And what more am I? I look for aid to the imagination. [But how mistakenly!] I am not that assemblage of limbs we call the human body; I am not a subtle penetrating air distributed throughout all these members; I am not a wind, a fire, a vapor, a breath or anything at all that I can image. I am supposing all these things to be nothing. Yet I find, while so doing, that I am still assured that I am a something.

Je pense donc je suis

...reading good books is like 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

One should never judge anything unless it is known.

Of all things, good sense is the most fairly distributed: everyone thinks he is so well supplied with it that even those who are the hardest to satisfy in every other respect never desire more of it than they already have.

Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess.

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

My third maxim was to try always to master myself rather than fortune and change my desires rather than changing how things stand in the world.

La lecture de tous les bons livres est comme une conversation avec les plus honnêtes gens des siècles passés.

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 ... 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 ... I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake ... There is nothing more ancient than the truth.