Quotes by Rene Descartes

• Whenever anyone has offended me, I try to raise my soul so high that the offense cannot reach it.
• Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has.
• One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.
• Perfect numbers like perfect men are very rare.
• The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt.
• The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.
• The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.
• The senses deceive from time to time, and it is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us even once.
• The two operations of our understanding, intuition and deduction, on which alone we have said we must rely in the acquisition of knowledge.
• There is nothing so strange and so unbelievable that it has not been said by one philosopher or another.
• When it is not in our power to follow what is true, we ought to follow what is most probable.
• You just keep pushing. You just keep pushing. I made every mistake that could be made. But I just kept pushing.
• An optimist may see a light where there is none, but why must the pessimist always run to blow it out?
• It is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived.
• Travelling is almost like talking with those of other centuries.
• I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.
• It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.
• Common sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world, for each one thinks he is so well-endowed with it that even those who are hardest to satisfy in all other matters are not in the habit of desiring more of it than they already have.
• A state is better governed which has few laws, and those laws strictly observed.
• Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems.
• Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it.
• Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.
• I am indeed amazed when I consider how weak my mind is and how prone to error.
• 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.
• I think; therefore I am.
• If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
• Illusory joy is often worth more than genuine sorrow.
• In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn, than to contemplate.
• Everything is self-evident.