Rene Descartes Quotes
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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.
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Be that as it may, there is fixed in my mind a certain opinion of long 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?
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I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.
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The two operations of our understanding, intuition and deduction, on which alone we have said we must rely in the acquisition of knowledge.
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This result could have been achieved either by his God endowing my intellect with a clear and distinct perception of everything about which I would ever deliberate, or simply by impressing the following rule so firmly upon my memory that I could never forget it: I should never judge anything that I do not clearly and distinctly understand.
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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.
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I did not imitate the skeptics who doubt only for doubting's sake, and pretend to be always undecided; on the contrary, my whole intention was to arrive at a certainty, and to dig away the drift and the sand until I reached the rock or the clay beneath.
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The object of music is a Sound. The end; to delight, and move various Affections in us.
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The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.
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There is nothing so far removed from us as to be beyond our reach, or so hidden that we cannot discover it.
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But possibly I am something more than I suppose myself to be.
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It is to the body alone that we should attribute everything that can be observed in us to oppose our reason.
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... regard this body as a machine which, having been made by the hand of God, is incomparably better ordered than any machine that can be devised by man, and contains in itself movements more wonderful than those in any machine. ... it is for all practical purposes impossible for a machine to have enough organs to make it act in all the contingencies of life in the way in which our reason makes us act.
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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?
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There is nothing so strange and so unbelievable that it has not been said by one philosopher or another.
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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.
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Variant: When it is not in our power to follow what is true, we ought to follow what is most probable.
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Let whoever can do so deceive me, he will never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I continue to think I am something.
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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.
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Neither the true nor the false roots are always real; sometimes they are imaginary; that is, while we can always imagine as many roots for each equation as I have assigned, yet there is not always a definite quantity corresponding to each root we have imagined.
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Human wisdom remains always one and the same although applied to the most diverse objects and it is no more changed by their diversity than the sunshine is changed by the variety of objects which it illuminates.
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In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn, than to contemplate.
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My third maxim was to try always to conquer myself rather than fortune, and to change my desires rather than the order of the world, and generally to accustom myself to believing that there is nothing entirely in our power except our thoughts, so that after we have done our best regarding things external to us, everything in which we do not succeed is for us absolutely impossible.
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It is possible that I am dreaming right now and that all of my perceptions are false.